The Project Gutenberg eBook of As a woman thinks
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: As a woman thinks

Author: Corra Harris


        
Release date: June 12, 2026 [eBook #78847]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78847

Credits: Charlene Taylor, Elizabeth Tapley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AS A WOMAN THINKS ***




AS A WOMAN THINKS

[Illustration: THERE IS A SPEECH IN THE WIND THAT WE DO NOT KNOW, A
HEROISM IN NATURE THAT WE DO NOT COMPREHEND]




 AS A
 WOMAN THINKS

 BY
 CORRA HARRIS
 _Author of “My Book and Heart”_


 BOSTON AND NEW YORK
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
 The Riverside Press Cambridge
 1925




 COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
 COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY CORRA HARRIS

 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


 The Riverside Press
 CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




CONTENTS


       I. INTRODUCTORY                       3

      II. WHEN I WAS A CHILD                10

     III. CHILDREN FROM THE CABIN           17

      IV. FEARSOME THOUGHTS                 20

       V. GREEN-GROWING SCRIPTURES          25

      VI. FATHER AND MOTHER                 31

     VII. MY MOTHER’S GOD                   38

    VIII. BOOK LEARNING                     41

      IX. SCHOOL DAYS                       47

       X. WHAT I READ                       52

      XI. THE TEACHER I HAD                 56

     XII. THE ‘REBEL’S’ CHILD               60

    XIII. NEW ENGLAND AND THE SOUTH         64

     XIV. CERTAIN LIES                      68

      XV. REPUTATION                        72

     XVI. ‘BEAUTIFUL AND PRECIOUS’          75

    XVII. THE WORKING OF LOVE               78

   XVIII. VENTURES IN SCRIPTURES            82

     XIX. THE WISDOM OF THE WORD            90

      XX. CONFESSION AND THE CHURCH         96

     XXI. LUNDY AND I WALK AND TALK         99

    XXII. WE CONSIDER GREEK CULTURE        105

   XXIII. THE YEAR IN OXFORD               110

    XXIV. HOMELY PLEASURE                  118

     XXV. LOVE AND AUTHORSHIP              122

    XXVI. THE MIND OF THE WRITER           126

   XXVII. DO YOU WANT TO WRITE?            132

  XXVIII. EXPRESSING ONE’S SELF            138

    XXIX. SITTING IN THE PUBLIC EYE        142

     XXX. ON LAYING DOWN YOUR LIFE         149

    XXXI. YOU MAKE YOURSELF                156

   XXXII. THE LADY POLITICIAN              166

  XXXIII. LIVING IN A BOOK                 172

   XXXIV. HAPPINESS                        178

    XXXV. THE LATTER DAYS                  186

   XXXVI. WHY WORSHIP EUROPE?              198

  XXXVII. THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN         202

 XXXVIII. GARDEN HAPPINESS                 207

   XXXIX. WAR                              220

      XL. WIDOWHOOD                        228

     XLI. ALL SORTS OF MEN                 237

    XLII. VARIOUS TYPES OF WOMEN           247

   XLIII. MERE MIND                        256

    XLIV. ISN’T LIFE EXCITING ENOUGH?      263

     XLV. AS WE SEEM TO OTHERS             270

    XLVI. FITTING INTO LIFE                284

   XLVII. FACTS AND TRUTHS                 290

  XLVIII. BOOKS: MY OWN AND OTHERS         294

    XLIX. CHANGE AND CONFUSION             304

       L. CAN WE BE HAPPY?                 309




AS A WOMAN THINKS




I

INTRODUCTORY


This is not a mystical tale, nor a literary interpretation of
addled-egg metaphysics. The mind I have has always been laid off
sensibly according to the latitudes and longitudes of actual
experiences in this present world. I never had an aura, nor the least
confidence in the existence of an oversoul. This phrase is the name of
a subliminal hysteria, pardonable in poets, but not in prose people
with ordinary midget souls. The one I have is no part of the common
spiritual vestment. On the contrary, it is an astounding fact too
intimately connected with my private consciousness to be exploited in
a book, or a street car, or any other public conveyance. I may draw
rings around it at a respectful distance before this record ends; I
may speculate prudently on souls in general, as one does in futures
sometimes; but I shall not risk the presumption of phonographing our
immortal part. It is offensive.

The mind is different. This is something no man will deny having,
although he may deny his soul. Even if he is pathetically limited
mentally, he is the enthusiastic autobiographer of what he thinks. If
he has no character, and no energy to achieve, he is the more likely
to be the historian, the dramatist, poet and prophet of his mind. He
cannot retain it. I have sometimes thought this explains how we came by
that safety valve called language. If we should suffer a total aphasia
of words, I suppose the human species would explode. The mind develops
so much more power in thinking than we can possibly achieve in action.

And to the last, the minds of other men, their secret thoughts, the
motives from which their actions spring remain the most interesting
things we can find out.

What follows is such a biography; not an analysis, nor a confession,
but the drama I have lived in thinking and believing; how the mind I
have, determined my conduct, courage, cowardice, and literally created
the life I have lived in spite of everything.

This is no vast undertaking like following the trail of a great
intellect. I am incapable of measuring the convolutions of such a
brain, say, as Herbert Spencer’s. In any case the record would be
scientific, not interesting. These people are born bright, but drab,
humanly speaking. I am not opposed to them, you understand; they have
their place somewhere over our heads, but not in the common life we
lead. My justification in choosing a simpler mind to exploit is that
most of us have this kind. We have actual experience in living our
thoughts; and the way we do it tears mere philosophy to shreds, no
matter how well and logically it has been thought out.

If you are writing the life of a prime minister, you begin by laying
the scenes in the times in which he lived. You must set down the kind
of king he served, discuss the people and problems that engaged
his attention and made him a great man. I am recording the history
of a mind as far removed as possible from the grandeur of kings and
the policies of prime ministers. But like these more pretentious
biographers, I am drawing my scenes in the right place, giving you a
glimpse of the summer-minded, slipshod gentlemen who traveled this
road, mismanaged their bankrupt fortunes with such humor and courage,
because these are my people. There is a fine rich pigment in the
quality of these people which imparts that first clear color to the
mind, and may account for the bright loom of thought upon which I spun
the days of my life with some wit, a certain dexterous sweetness and an
awful strength of hope never justified by the facts.

I do not know how it may be with others who have outgrown themselves
and become merely the residents of culture and learning, but I
experience a sensation of uneasiness when conversing with a man who
evades his own personal pronoun. I always change my seat as soon as
possible, because he is concealing some one who should be present and
apparent if he is talking.

He will never say ‘I think,’ ‘I believe,’ or ‘I know,’ but he will
begin with ‘It is said.’ This may be a scholarly affectation of
self-effacement, for all I know, but it is neither natural nor sincere.

We are every one born in the first person singular. We live and die
feeling that way. Therefore the pronoun ‘I’ is the most honest and
revealing word in the English language. It is our obligatory oral
signature. It is not an egotistical part of speech, unless you are an
egotist, but the born-and-bred name by which every man calls himself.
Without this provision, you may say, of nature in him, we should never
be able to identify him or know whether he is talking his own truth or
his own lies or quoting them from some one else.

This is the reason why certain of my books are written in the first
person. They must be. It is my way of writing as other people feel,
interpretative. I am being confidential, not boastful, except possibly
where we may boast together. I am telling experience common to us as
human beings and giving the reader the advantage of keeping his own
silence.

The method works. It encourages many to give tongue to their lives and
feelings, which is a relief if they have held them in for a long time
and never expected to see them said anywhere. Just write the truth of
your own heart and you will find out how many men and women have lived
that same truth more valiantly than you have without emitting it into
copy! I have had to make that humbling revision of my attributes since
the publication of ‘My Book and Heart.’ These silent ones who write
letters not for publication have found in this volume the witness of
their own hearts, a record more intimate and personal to them than if
it had been written in the third person, or of one already dead and
subject in the very nature of the case to biographical speculations.

The record I am now writing will have no such effect, though it may
be equally veracious, because we are further apart in our thoughts
than we ever are in our feelings. We may talk much or little, but
most of our thinking is done and kept in silence. The human mind is a
queer thing. It has more ways of the wild creatures than we have. It
never ceases to circle either upon the wing or to prowl in that secret
darkness which conceals every man’s mind. It goes off and comes back
laden with strange thoughts while you sit gazing with candid eyes
into the candid eyes of your companion, whose mind has also been out
scouting around and has returned without ever meeting your mind on the
way.

I suppose many a man, seated in the possessive case beside some woman,
who has a Spencerian countenance and speaks to him in pale blue
language of sweetness, would leap for his life if he could see so much
as the flash of the thought she is whetting in her neat little head
against his peace and happiness. And sometimes if a woman had a look
into the mind of her hero she might become an idol breaker in the
twinkling of an eye.

But we are not to be judged by what goes on in our minds. One never
gets cut in a word or a deed. If all the tools of vengeance forged
there were used, this world would be a terrible place. If all the dark
thoughts we have were spoken, no man or woman would trust us. But these
are the mental vaporings of our lower and meaner natures, conquered in
most of us by the moral sense we have acquired which has established
better standards.

A wise man can record all he knows of life in one book; but the
scriptures of the common man require two books, and maybe a few
gospels, as a sort of quotient in the long division of living. For us
there would be the book of the heart, where we keep memories, the hopes
that failed, our loves and hates, and whatever Beatitude we needed to
comfort or praise us, whether it is a friend, a woman, or a bit of the
Word. Your wise man takes no account of this copy. In his analysis of
the phenomenon of man, the heart is a figure of speech which refers
to the reflex action of the emotions. Then there is for us the other
record of the mind, quite distinct. It is the place where we keep the
law, or break it; the motives which stimulate and control us, and
determine our relations to other men--and to God, who we think made us.

This last notion, in my opinion, is a gross exaggeration of the
functions of the Almighty. He made what we call mind and we use
it to create ourselves. It works one way in this generation and
another way in the next generation. Sometimes it is war; then it
is religion, art, one kind of science or another; or it may be a
magnificent covetousness, practiced under such terms as industrialism,
commercialism, or even the League of Nations--always filled with
eleemosynary impulses, for conscience’ sake, according to that very
shrewd mind he is developing. It is really the sand-pile where the
ostrich of him hides its head. It is at last that thing in us which is
as easily degraded by a false belief as by the meanest vice. It can
exalt a heathen and trap a Christian saint. It is the way of life we
choose, right or wrong.

If some one laid his mind on the table, so to speak, not as a
confession, nor even as a defense, but as a certified human document,
it might cast a flicker of light upon dark corners to be turned in the
lives of other people. So if I show what a dim thing it was in the
beginning, how a child divines peace and happiness without thinking,
what a terror thinking became afterwards, how bravely and adventurously
my mind guided me, how cunningly it misguided me, what burdensome
rewards it earned for me, and what dividends in peace I have lost by
following the best Scriptures according to my mind--some of you who
read this record may get a hint to watch the thing and control it more
wisely than I have controlled mine.

What I shall write will be sown with errors from the point of view
of a psychologist, which will be proof to you that it is a veracious
record. There may be laws governing mind; but if so, they are like
so many other laws we cannot keep and survive. A logical sentence in
thinking according to the exigencies of living is bound to be a very
short sentence. The longer ones that last through the days of our
years contradict much wisdom and a good many Scriptures. But we do
get through, and looking back we do see the Word still standing, not
changed.




II

WHEN I WAS A CHILD


In the year 1874 there was a road which crossed the State of Georgia.
It has disappeared long since, changed by the will of some memory in
the hearts of the people. But you may trace it still when the daisies
bloom in May. These flowers are not indigenous to this section. Their
first seed fell here from the provender fed to Sherman’s cavalry. So,
in May, that month of Decoration Days, they bloom again like a long,
narrow memorial wreath laid upon the grave of a dead and glorious past.
They wind and turn and tumble down many a steep hillside in North
Georgia, as this road made its tortuous way among these hills. But
when it slipped into the lower, smoother land, it straightened out and
lay like a broad red-and-golden ribbon between the great plantations.
Farther and farther it stretched until it slid into the city of Augusta
and became Green Street--so named, I suppose, because the road that
made it came down into the white old town through such a fair and
verdant country.

Other roads entered this highway, as smaller streams flow into a
broader, swifter river. There were signposts to guide the traveler. I
remember one in particular at the entrance of the old Petersburg road,
because as a child it seemed to me like a very old man who had been
pointing the way a long time and now leaned wearily in the direction
indicated. Above a huge fist, rudely drawn, with the forefinger
raised, appeared the legend:

    ‘This is the way to Mill or Ferry,
    Go, it, Traveler, Sad or Merry.’

We had sentiment in those days with a lilt to it, and a signpost was as
good a place as any to publish it. We were not seeking fame. We were
famous enough already. We were surfeited with the terrible distinction
of having just concluded a cruel war in glorious defeat. We were some
kind of magnificently irresponsible truth but lately crushed to earth,
and we were rising again after the grandiloquent manner of our kind,
with a beam in our eye and a song on our lips--but not prosperous!
It requires more than a century for the phœnix of man to rise above
the ashes of war in material things. We arose by a sort of rhythm of
the spirit, unencumbered by wealth. The ascent is quicker and less
expensive.

Gentlemen in rags traveled this road upon their old raw-boned
horses--Don Quixotes, every one, still tilting against the windmills of
a graver, saner civilization that had been thrust upon them. They were
rumpled, ruddy men who bore themselves with an air and never complained
of their poverty after the manner of ignoble men when misfortune
overtakes them. They held onto their leisure for a long time as the
last asset of a lost fortune, and visited a great deal from one old
ramshackle mansion to another. Their laughter was a joyous eruption.
They were pedantic with a flourish. They could drop you a long
quotation from Faust or Shakespeare without seeming absurd or causing
their victims the least embarrassment, such as we feel when a meaner
man quotes a Promethean passage. They required these luminous vestments
woven by great poets to adorn the qualities they had. Any one of them
would have been admired as a character in a book or as the subject of a
funeral oration.

The women of this period were strangely lyrical. Never again shall we
see so many fine ladies rise with such grace above the inconvenience of
poverty. Dressed in a chignon, a curl, and a cotton frock, they ignored
all styles and remained the last word in the poetry of fashion. They
had swishing silken virtues and conducted themselves after the manner
of the heroine in the last chapter of Proverbs.

Eighty miles above Augusta there stood two huge gate-posts, topped with
roughly hewed balls. Between them hung the old gray gate of a famous
plantation. When the sun was low in the west it shone through these
palings like bars of gold as if there might be nothing beyond but space
and silence and brightness. Inside, there was a long avenue stretching
away through the trees. Far down, there was a high green terrace; above
the terrace, an ancient flower garden, bordered with boxwood and spired
with the tops of juniper trees. Blossoming boughs waved like flags
in the summer wind. All the spaces inside were filled with humbler
flowers; phlox and lilies, violets and hyacinths made misty blue veils
in the shadows. Long-soled cactus spread like green footprints upon the
dark earth--the whole lonely place a wilderness of bloom left to govern
itself.

Somewhere behind this garden in those days stood a little house, left
over like a poor relation in adversity.

I was born there.

My recollection now is that it was a good little house, with a busy
mind and a kind heart inside, where a female child would be taught the
Lord’s Prayer at an early age, and how to sew and knit; but it was not,
you would have concluded at a glance, the cradle of genius. Very few
people make provision beforehand for geniuses in their families. They
are like the seed that birds scatter--liable to spring up anywhere, but
never to be anticipated. For my part, I doubt if they are born at all,
but produce themselves by some chance of circumstances; almost any man
or woman is remotely liable to become one.

But my first memories are not of this house, nor even of my father and
mother. I had that faint impression of them which grown people have of
Providence, to be depended upon, but too far off in consciousness to
be cultivated. My measure of relationship at this time was that father
was very tall, and mother was much shorter and very slender. I was some
kind of a little pinwheel of life revolving away from them.

In these earliest years I must have belonged more particularly to the
vegetable kingdom. My first vivid impressions are of being in the open,
not doing anything, certainly not thinking. I seem to have grown like
the grass on the rim of the green terrace beyond the flower garden for
a long time. Father and mother are very sketchy. They appear now in my
memory of this period at rare intervals.

I was not sufficiently acquainted with them then to be aware of their
anxieties. They belonged to another world. I can barely remember
father’s blue gaze following me about, usually with the light of
laughter in it. Mother was always busy. She had large gray eyes that
caught me up with a glance, washed me like a saucer, set me down again
and went on to her next deed with the swiftness of one who wore wings
on her feet. This excessive energy may account for the fact that I
formed no apron-string attachment to her.

The reputation I had, however, was that of being an extremely
affectionate child. This only proves that any record written from
memory must be incomplete. I suppose Homer omitted many important
historical facts which did not rhyme with those he sang so lustily in
his Iliad. Love anchored me so completely later in life, I am rather
glad to think that in these first years my affections must have been
like those of a busy man for his family, usually latent, but practiced
with convincing charm at odd moments. I do not remember ever crying for
my mother as other young children do, because I so completely believed
in her. She could not forget me or forsake me. So far as I knew then,
she would last forever. There was nothing, literally nothing, in my
world to worry about. I was already living by faith.

This is the earliest faculty we develop. It is an enduring illusion
at which the world and all the vicissitudes of life tear in vain.
We replace every hope that fails with another one. We change our
standards and our creeds, but we live and die believing in something.
It is a medicine we use to ease the mind. I have had so many letters
lately from men and women who no longer believe in God. They have
fallen over the precipice of rationalism into an awful pit of darkness.
But it is perfectly apparent that any one of them would be quick to
believe in a man or woman. They are the same old barnacles of faith we
all are, who have lost their hold upon the good bottom, raked off by
the lives they have lived or the thinking they have practiced. They are
the most credulous people in the world. I never knew one who would not
trust a convincing rascal. Or he will take to occultism, some spiritual
nostrum, as a certain class of people prefer patent medicine for their
physical ailments. What I mean is that the power to believe is born in
us, and we must exercise it one way or the other, as we breathe to live.

I have a vivid recollection of the child I was then, as one might
remember the person he used to be in another life, sitting on the green
crown of my world, very pudgy, back hunched, fingers curled in the
grass, the hair on my head sticking up like a fine bright fringe, eyes
wide and quiet, fixed upon nothing in particular, the groggy little
somnambulist of a bright dream.

I remember one of the illusions I had. The big gate at the end of
the avenue was the end of my world. I accompanied father and mother
through it at rare intervals, but my understanding was that we passed
immediately into another world. I shall experience no more tremendous
anticipations rising from my dust in the last day than I did then,
seated in the bottom of the rickety old buggy, being drawn through the
black weather-beaten portals of that gate.

Once in so often I made the journey up there alone to peep through
the palings at this neighboring world. My fear was that it might have
fallen off or been blown away in a high wind. Being very young and
unacquainted with the other stars, I dreaded the possibility of being
stuck up against one just outside our big gate; or worse still, finding
nothing at all beyond it but emptiness.

There is a grandeur about total ignorance, winged with imagination.
Children alone have it. They endure terrors and visions that would
drive a sane person mad. They are little Saturns revolving in the
incandescent rings of fancy, no substance to their thoughts, no
realities in the secret world where they move and believe everything.




III

CHILDREN FROM THE CABIN


The activities of a great plantation went on about me, but I recall
none of the clamor of this business; only the ringing of the
blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil in the shop under the mulberry trees.
The long procession of negroes sitting sidewise on their mules coming
up from the fields through the deepening dusk of the evening were a
part of the day I lived, like the lengthening shadows of the trees on
the grass. The thin curls of smoke that began to hurry out of the tops
of the chimneys from the cabins below the avenue used to hang like long
lavender scarfs in the air. I remember that from the top of the terrace
I could see the negro children milling and playing before these cabin
doors. But I never joined them.

There was an invisible mark between me and these little black ones that
must not be crossed. The intimate association between white children
and negro children has been greatly exaggerated by the sentimental
literature of the South written since the Civil War, to appeal, I have
always thought, to the imagination of the North, where most of the
reading in this country was done after that period. Southern white
children of the stock from which I sprang sustained a passionately
devoted relation to the old negroes, men and women, who remained
attached to our families. This attachment remains unbroken to this day.

But no such ties ever existed between us and the young ones. The basis
of mutual affection and confidence had been destroyed before I was
born and the doom of the negro sealed, not by the Civil War, but by
propaganda that followed it for fifty years. Where enmity is created,
justice will never be done. But hate and distrust beget the sense of
injustice, which produces every abomination possible between a strong
race and a weaker one.

I have not one recollection of having played with a negro child. My
only memory lasts because it was striped in with a switch. Susan, a
little negro girl, came to the house one day for a pitcher of milk.
I took her aside and examined her black kinky wool wrapped in white
cotton thread. I did not think much of it and said so.

Mother punished me severely for this. I do not recall the words she
used. They were undoubtedly stern and simple, for she had that kind of
a vocabulary; but the gist of it was that the quality of a superior
was that he never took advantage of an inferior, and that it was
ignoble to humiliate one by referring to his natural defects, whether
of hair or color. This doctrine steadfastly kept also by my father,
in the end cost him a two-thousand-acre cotton plantation. For there
were a hundred negroes on the place, and they took every advantage
that inferiors can take of a generous superior. The only reason why it
has not been equally expensive to me is that I never had so much as a
plantation to lose and have dealt with fewer people of this class.

But the impression I received that day concerning my obligations to
those less fortunate by nature, as I stood tearfully diminished before
mother and still stinging from the duty of her switch, has never left
me. And it is now a fact, which I have proved by experience, that it
is more enhancing to keep one’s self-respect than to get the advantage
of an inferior person in any kind of transaction. After so many years
of this kind of noble prancing morally, it produces a certain insolent
sense of quality, not justified, of course, by the person you really
are, all told. Still, it is a grand feeling and a part of the mind I
have finally rounded up out of life.




IV

FEARSOME THOUGHTS


Poetry and superstition were atmospheric conditions of the mind. As
a child, I believed in ghosts, spirits, and signs. Knowledge has
delivered me, but my instincts never will. I can think of no other
reason why I still pass the seventh day of March warily and more
innocently than I do my other days. This has been regarded as an
ominous day in my family for generations, although I do not recall a
single disaster that overtook any of us on this day. I am also at some
pains not to see a new moon for the first time through the branches of
trees, because mammy often warned me when I was a child that such an
indiscretion would be followed by bad luck.

I received constant instructions from the negro servants in the
primitive occult sciences, duly proved and illustrated.

There was a tiny sunken grave outlined with white flint stones on the
edge of the forest behind the house. Aunt Parthenia, the old black
woman who milked the cows, told me that a child had been murdered and
buried there. She said the face was very pale, the hair white like
wool. It was a small child about my age, and wore a long white gown.
Just at dark she said it often climbed a tree and wailed piteously on
account of having been murdered. Hidden in the plum bushes near the
house, I used to see this thing clinging and swinging in the top of a
poplar tree that grew beside the grave. I cannot recall the features of
any living person I knew then so vividly as I do the pale, pinched face
of that forlorn little ghost. The hair on its head did stand out and
glisten in the darkness. And my own hair stood up in delicious fright,
listening to its shuddering cries. Years passed before I could believe
this was a screech owl screaming.

Somewhere in this same period I met a ghost in the flower garden when
I was expecting no such encounter--a crooked woman wrapped in a black
shawl. I remember how stiff and ghostly white her hands were. She
looked at me and I could not move. After a while mother came and led me
back to the house. My legs were trembling with excitement, but I did
not tell her what I had seen. I never confided any of my experiences
with ghosts to her, feeling somehow that she might disapprove of them.
She was particular about the company I kept.

Mother belonged to the old order of saints. She was the kind of
Christian who would have died at the stake for a doctrine. She believed
in infant baptism because this was one of the doctrines of her church,
and made haste to have me baptized before I could hold up my head. She
not only believed you must be born again, spiritually speaking, but she
had her doubts about your conversion if you did not suffer the birth
pangs of repentance at least with groanings and tears. I was too young
to think a doubt when she instructed me in the doctrine of damnation.
Hell was a very literal pit of fire and brimstone, where the wicked
burned forever and the worm never dieth. If she had not included the
worm in this picture, I might not have received the reptilian idea of
the place, which was particularly abhorrent. One day I met a turtle in
the flower garden. The eyes were red. There were red gills under its
neck. I fled shrieking, believing it to be some kind of infernal insect
that had crawled out of the pit, still hot and malevolent.

At this age I must have been like those birds in the far places that do
not fear or fly at the sight of man. I was never afraid of the dark,
nor of the considerable number of ghosts I collected under the guidance
of Aunt Parthenia.

I also believed in certain animals. The marvelous things I heard about
the doings of rabbits, cats, and foxes surpass anything recorded in
Æsop’s Fables. There was a donkey on the plantation. I was shy of this
beast, not because I was afraid of him, but because he might speak
to me. Some native delicacy I had, forbade conversation with an ass.
But if our old dog wagged his tail, I understood him. I have always
been able to interpret dogs. They have no souls, no minds of their
own; but if they associate intimately with human beings, and not with
other dogs, they develop a telepathic relation to us that amounts to
divination. They understand us and act according to our will and mood,
however secret, because they worship us.

I have had fearful thoughts along this line. What if we sustain
a similar relation to the Almighty? What if we are simply the
tail-wagging medium of infinite mind? Such speculations are no doubt
of the devil, but if you have a mind you cannot resist now and then
taking an intellectual whiff at your powers and principalities of
darkness.

Negroes do not include fairies among their superstitions; so I was
deprived of the lighter, happier comradeship of these gossamer-winged
beings. My impression is that they do not last so long, nor are they
so sternly stimulating to the imagination as the illusions we have of
spirits and ghosts. Even a child discards his fairies at an early age,
but mankind never quite escapes the prescience of the supernatural.
Wise men as well as fools have been haunted by these uneasy figments.
All literature from beginning to end is populated with ghosts and
apparitions of the dead. This is testimony accumulated, not about
the supernatural, but about what we are. The Lord knew us. This is
the reason why heavenly messengers were seen by the naked eye in the
Scriptures. Something imprisoned in us responds to that ‘cloud of
witnesses,’ and to the Holy Ghost of Jesus Christ. We require such
symbolism because we are forever and inalienably kin to spirits. But we
never see them.

During the whole of my life I have been subject to these visions. I
have had a curious consciousness of not being alone when I was really
alone. I have seen a whiteness take shape in impenetrable darkness,
heard sounds, had a sense of wings and motion about me in silence
and stillness. Maybe this is merely the blind stirring of immortal
instinct; but my suspicion is that these ‘presences’ we feel, or think
we see, are freaks of memory, subconsciously aroused by the loves or
hates we used to have, and that any one with a lively imagination can
get himself haunted or blessed by these illusions. I think it is an
exercise in supernatural lying which never fully convinces a rational
person; therefore, a dangerous diversion to indulge, and bad for the
soul. The practice of spiritualism seems to me gross and strangely
repulsive, like some kind of abnormal vulgarity. Compare the noble
significance of that ‘cloud of witnesses’ mentioned in the Scriptures
with the ‘spirit’ conjured up at a psychic séance. The first is
designed to inspire faith and courage; the latter merely gratifies your
human anxiety or curiosity by informing you that your maiden aunt who
died last spring is well and happy!

We must learn; it is inevitable. The time comes when we can no longer
avoid the facts accumulated by human experience. I would not go so far
as to call this wisdom; much of it is based upon errors of judgment,
weakness, and prejudice, but we must master as much of it as possible
in order to live sensibly in an erroneous world.

I come now to this momentous period in my own life when the amorphous
but still entrancingly immortal faculties I had must be adjusted,
according to the mortal mind, to God and man. This is a flighty
business when you consider the strange contradictions involved.




V

GREEN-GROWING SCRIPTURES


Father was sensitive to the sublime. The calm mind of the heavens
on a clear starlit night could move him to the noblest flights of
imagination. He must stretch himself mentally and let out a spark of
eloquence or prophecy; it made no difference so long as he relieved the
pressure of infinities upon his strident soul.

He had a habit, when I was this very small child, of pacing back and
forth in the warm moonlit darkness of summer evenings. I recall myself
like a caterpillar sticking to him there. With one bare foot placed
upon the toe of each of his dusty boots and my arms clasped about his
long legs, I rode backwards; still, the stride was exciting.

One night when we were traveling in this fashion beneath a particularly
clear starlit sky, he halted, swung a grand gesture, peered down at me
as from a great height.

‘You will live to see airships up there flying like a flock of birds!’
he said.

‘Corra,’ mother interrupted hastily from the porch, ‘come in, wash your
feet and go to bed!’

I obeyed, too young to suspect that she was guarding me from what was
supposed to be a streak of insanity in father’s family.

It seems that one of his remote ancestors had conceived this same idea
of flying through the heavens on his own wing power. He was humored in
this hobby until the day he ascended to the roof of his mansion geared
up in two huge wings of his own devising and hopped off. He survived
only because they did break the force of his fall, but he spent the
remaining years of his life in close confinement.

From this time forth some one in each succeeding generation of father’s
people had been born with this predilection for flying. Mother was
determined it should not be her child in this generation. She was a
sensible woman, who had a legitimate imagination and conceived only of
incandescent angels being properly endowed with wings.

On the other hand, father had his anxieties. Mother’s Uncle John
was an intensely religious man in an age when only preachers were
distinguished for their piety in this section, and he was not a
preacher. His mind was fixed on the Bible and he read no other book.
Father believed he was quite mad on this subject.

I had a rather unusual memory long before I had any of the other
intellectual ingredients that go to the making of a mind. When mother
began to read Genesis aloud to me, my ear caught the tune of that
genealogical chapter which records the generations of Adam with so many
repetitions of the word begat.

One day I climbed upon father’s knee and recited too many verses from
this chapter to him. I should have let him have them all but for the
fact that he interrupted. He exchanged a look with mother.

‘Stop reading that book aloud to her. Remember your Uncle John!’ he
said.

Parents are strangely suspicious of what Nature may have done to their
children. The first thing they do when one is born is to look him over
to be sure he is made up properly, not too long or too short anywhere,
and not one-sided. The mother’s travail is never over until she
calls out faintly, ‘Doctor, is my child all right?’ and receives the
assurance that he is. Then she lets go and fades away into the bliss
of motherhood. My parents received the best assurances about me then.
Still, as I grew, strangeness of one sort and another showed up in me;
then they would hark back, each behind the other, to account for it. It
was not the child I was; it was what they knew about themselves which
might crop out in me that disturbed them. I suppose all parents suffer
from this same sense of ancestral guilt toward their offsprings.

Somewhere in another book I have set down at length the impression made
upon me by the story of creation as related in Genesis. Here, following
the trail of my mind rather than the emotional effects created upon the
life of a child, I pass on with the bare statement that it fitted the
mind I had then. And I venture to add that it still spreads amazing and
veracious before the mind I have now. It is that book in the Bible most
like God. In the others the record is diminished to His dealings with
us. There is more room in this first one for seeing just God, is what I
mean. The more you live in the open, in remote and quiet places where
the evidences still show like green-growing scriptures, the easier it
is to believe. For me it will remain to the last my favorite gospel of
the goodness and wonders of the Almighty. I do not know why, unless, as
life, duty, and conscience pressed hard upon me, these first chapters
turned out to be less obligatory than, say, the Ten Commandments. Many
a time they have been like great visions in a dark place. It was like
seeing original things take shape. I suppose other people have had the
same experience; but in this mood the first herbs of the field have
been almost visible, in their fresh greenness, through the mists of the
first morning of time.

Long afterwards, when I began to write a few scriptures of my own,
and must accomplish some feat of imagination to reach what I know, I
used to read the first chapter of Genesis as devout Episcopalians read
prayers to God from a book. I never caught the rhythm of that great
moment when the light was divided from the darkness and the waters
from the lands, but hearing the roll and rumble of it has certainly
lengthened the stride of my mind.

I had a good deal of the Old Testament imparted to me before I received
my other mental training. As far down as I can reach now into the mind
I had then, I am a very small human, traveling by speculations through
Deuteronomy, Judges, and believing that Second Samuel was Samuel’s son.
I am keeping company with the major and minor prophets. I am the little
girl who knew Ruth and could see her in the wheat fields, gathering the
scattered heads that fell behind the reapers. I was very much attached
to her and to David in his youth. But never to the Song of Solomon.
Mother always skipped it as ‘unsuitable’ when she read from the Bible.
She had a certain look on her face when she would be turning the leaves
and came upon this Song, as if she had seen something indelicate, and
invariably flirted the page over it hastily as you would cover such a
thing. My impression is that she did not think very well of Solomon. To
this day I share her prejudices. Too much of his wisdom is derived from
the bad end of experience.

But imagine a child’s mind taking shape under these influences. I
was haunted by ghosts and fed on the stately Scriptures of the Old
Testament. Jerusalem and Nineveh are the first cities I remember
hearing about. I was particularly interested in the latter because of
the deep-sea disaster which overtook Jonah on his way there. I believed
everything, but not with the literal humble mind of the obedient
spirit. I have always reserved the right to believe in the Scriptures
intelligently. So far as I am able to judge, stupid faith is as
dangerous and belittling to the soul as a false doctrine.

This story of Jonah gagged me even at that early age. And to this
day I am still wondering if any one saw the whale swallow him, or if
it was a mere wave that vomited him upon the shore. Not that I doubt
the Scriptures, you understand, but Jonah. What I mean is that in
the horror of being cast overboard and drowned, he may honestly have
believed he was being swallowed by a great fish, when he was really
descending into the bowels of the sea.

The instruction I had from the Old Testament marked my first definite
formations mentally. They seemed, as I look back now, to have opened
the casements of my mind to more gallant illusions, verified by the
angels and prophets who appeared so constantly in these Scriptures. I
used to strain myself to see Elijah rising in a chariot of fire. A red
cloud in the sunset sky might have convinced me of the repetition of
this miracle. I was a small human drop in the eternity of summer days.
I had no sense of time. I felt very near the beginning of things. But
I was unaffected morally. I went about my business as usual, without a
scruple as to what was right or wrong.




VI

FATHER AND MOTHER


I felt a certain silent intimacy with my father. This was due to the
fact that we were both highly sensitized emotionally, but not morally.
I received the impression that there was more space in father for
the practices of a free spirit. It seems to me that we both avoided
the house because it was such a good place, ruled by order and
righteousness. Nothing could be changed in it, least of all mother,
who loved us with a consuming affection. I did not know the name of
the sensation at the time, but I always came into it feeling like a
prodigal son. I remember some such expression on father’s face shot
with humor. I cannot think what we had been doing; probably nothing
reprehensible; but I was full of secret stuff not to be exposed to her,
because I never could tell what she would approve. Father knew and was
silent for the same reason.

She was literally a religious woman. She believed in the Christian
religion without tears. She could perform her spiritual duties on a
cold collar and keep the Commandments without praying or fasting.
I have always thought she might have been a trifle short on the
Beatitudes, because she practiced them with less emotion than any
other person I have ever known. She had resignation and endurance to
a remarkable degree, but she was sublimely deficient in humility. My
memory of her, revived by the wit of a mature mind, is that she was
admirably conscious of her own worth and standing before the Lord,
though I never heard her testify in an experience meeting, which was
one of the pious diversions of saints in those days.

Father was spiritually minded, but only intermittently religious,
during which periods he far outstripped mother in the bloom and beauty
of his virtues. But he frequently fell back into original sin, where
he seemed to belong; but was never comfortable, poor soul. He would
invariably rise by the means of the most spectacular repentance. I have
observed that these acrobatic souls belong to men with more histrionic
talent than ordinary saints have. This is the reason why they are more
beloved even if they are less dependable. I am certain mother loved
father more than she could have loved a better man. It is the quality
of goodness in women, not a weakness.

Mother used to pass into silence sometimes. She became inaccessible. No
tears, going about her duties with a certain sweet quietness as if she
was walking more softly before the Lord than usual and hoped this would
do some good.

I still think I was right in my impressions of these periods. My
feeling was that something grand was going on. I distinctly felt the
presence of God everywhere. My lid came off in this mysteriously
electric atmosphere. I suppose it is the same sensation formerly
enjoyed by emotional people when they shouted during divine services.
I hoped for some change in the methodical routine of things, and did
not get it. When the hero of the house fell from grace he disappeared.
He was not. But I was quarantined by the tightening of the ligaments
of all mother’s virtues and obliged to practice my rectitudes more
scrupulously than usual. No escape to the terrace outside. And the
house felt like a church--terribly hallowed.

But when father emerged from the dark pit of his transgression,
haggard with that look of noble repentance remorse imparts to the male
countenance, I beheld him with awe and speechless admiration, having no
knowledge of the cause of this moral grandeur or that so much eloquence
covered delinquency.

I have a dim candle-lit memory of one of these scenes which took place
in mother’s room when I was a very small child. Glowing logs upon
the hearth that cast a red radiance over the bare white boards of
the floor. A candle lighted upon the candle-stand like the faintest
flickering flame in this darkness. Stiff blue calico curtains drawn
back from the windows and primly tied. A clear cold night outside and
stars shining through the symmetrical angle of these curtains. Mother
sitting in her corner, pale as peace and righteousness, hair black and
smoothly coiled, skirts arranged just so. Hands folded, her large gray
eyes slightly raised, very peaceful, as if she gazed upon her cross and
knew she could bear it. I sat in my small split-bottomed chair, hands
clasped around the arms of this chair, elbows sticking out, fair hair
glowing like the fringe of innocence in this rich darkness, copper-toed
shoes shining, head barely high enough above the window-sill to see
the stars.

But I was not looking at the stars. I was wearing my church manners and
watching mother’s face as one consults the clock when it is time for
services to begin. I had been in these family altar services before
and knew that one was at hand now because the big Bible lay upon the
candle-stand. This Book was never opened except upon great spiritual
occasions or when the pastor called. Mother dispensed her daily
Scriptures from a smaller, well-worn volume.

There was a step outside, coming with a long crunching stride. The
stars twinkled with that giggling sense of humor they may have acquired
from watching the doings of men for so many ages. The door was thrust
open. A blast of icy wind entered. The flame of the candle flickered,
as if this was no place for a good little candle. I vibrated. My dear
father, whom I had not seen for days, strode in, you may say, upon
this blast. But I restrained my natural affections, as one does when a
solemn ceremony is about to begin. Why this ceremony I did not know,
but once in so often it had to be performed, because it seemed to
greatly enhance father and to refresh and gladden mother.

Father was a pallid and noble figure, somewhat disheveled, like a
long-legged eagle that has recently weathered a high wind. He took one
sweeping glance around, caught my adoring eyes upturned, and discarded
them as a bagatelle in this momentous situation. Mother merely ceased
to bat her eyes, gaze still fixed upon her cross. Let the mountains
fall upon her, let the waters of all the seas roll over her, she would
not be moved except by decent repentance!

Well, he must go through with it as usual, is what I know now father
decided after that momentary survey, and kept his pace to the big
rickety chair beside the candle-stand. He let himself down into it like
a god overtaken in a fault, glanced distastefully at the Bible and
emitted the sigh of a bellows. My breast heaved in suspense. I knew
that my father would presently become a man of the Lord and open the
Book. These were the only occasions when he was associated in my mind
with our God. I coveted the experience. What I did not know was that he
dreaded the blasphemy demanded of him. He had his feelings and Adam’s
modesty when his sin would be dying hard in him. Then some emotion
would overcome him; maybe a man’s grateful memories of this invincibly
good woman who could not be made to forsake him. What was God’s opinion
of him compared to her dear wishes? Such a foolish little she demanded
in exchange for all she gave. Something like this I know passed through
his mind. Then he would open the Book, turn to the Psalms, taste a few
until he struck one with the right note, not too revealing, something
vague and nobly sung. That night he read this one:

‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplications: in thy
faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness. And enter not into
judgment with thy servant.’

He was ever a man quickly moved to the left or right in the moral
world. Give him a full glass, a roistering companion, and he could race
with the devil himself. Give him the noblest words of penitence and he
could produce the accompanying remorseful emotions. He could shrive
himself with the dignity and majesty of a saint. So now for the moment
he was every whit David broken by his transgression. Grief descended
upon him and shook him like a blessing:

‘Hear me speedily, O Lord: my spirit faileth,’ he read on woefully.
‘Hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into
the pit.’ And so on until he came to the end.

I did not understand, but I felt the wind of sorrow blowing from the
eloquent lips of my father. I was bursting with emotion, my lips
primped, my eyes fixed upon him full of tears. The one thing that
restrained me was mother’s inscrutable face. She not only understood
the Psalm but the man who was reading it. She simply used this method
to change the scenes of his singularly adaptable spirit.

‘Let us pray,’ he rumbled in a choked voice.

I have a lively recollection of this prayer. It was a good one. Very
few people have the real gift of prayer, and then only under the
emotional pressure of remorse. I have heard the ring of platform
oratory many a time in the prayer of a saint who had nothing but his
congregation’s sins of which to repent. Father, splendidly poised
on one knee, recited a psalm of his own to the Lord, not so good as
David’s but along the same line. He cast his iniquities from him in
sentences that clashed like bright swords. Sobs shook him. I was
also deeply moved, as I am to this day by great music of powerful
prayers. Kneeling like a little rag doll, very low before my chair, I
accompanied him with sounds of grief, meows of a kitten saint, decently
repressed until, casting a watery glance through my fingers, I saw
father wiping his face on the blue window curtains. This was too much.
I keened my nose and let out a wail that steadied the great mourner and
ended his petition.




VII

MY MOTHER’S GOD


I suppose there are still such husbands in the world, but I am
wondering if there are any more women like mother. Maybe she would
be called a pill now. Looking back, the methods she used to restore
father’s soul do seem drastic. She loved him with a shrewd tenderness;
but let him break his traveling gait toward Heaven and she was the
most adroit persecutor of the damned and fallen I have ever known. She
kept a good little house not more than one short prayer path from the
gates of Heaven. Everything in it was clean, white where it should
be white, glistening where it should shine. If by chance an unworthy
person crossed her threshold, he brought his former virtues with him
and practiced them. She demanded at least a noble deceit of goodness.

This was the kind of father I had, and this was my mother. I was a sort
of human hybrid composed of these two natures. Nothing could cure me
of a dangerous likeness to father. I was closer kin to him in mind and
spirit. I may have inherited some invincible stamina from mother, a
capacity for standards and principles. My notion is that father merely
begot me, and that mother continued to exercise the same functions to
me morally that she did physically before I was born. She produced
qualities of character in me which went far toward determining my
woman’s life afterwards. She had Moses’ gift for guiding me and
controlling the rabble in me.

But I have never reached the promised land. Neither did the children
of Israel under Moses. No one does. Your Moses is too much of a
disciplinarian. Looking back now at my wilderness, it seems to me if I
make the last stretch it will be upon the wings of a spirit inherited
from father. But I shall never make it now. I shall pass like other
people who have been anxious to be good all their lives--barely in
sight of that fair and happy land. I have been encompassed about by
too great a cloud of witnesses to just righteousness. The burden of
being obedient to mother’s God, and later on to the God of a still
more drastic saint, has wearied me. I am too tired now to shout and be
happy. I shall probably die up here in a high place, barely in sight of
the promised land as usual.

I have often wondered how real saints feel about this. I know how they
talk, but do they in their secret hearts as humans sometimes regret
the hard and narrow way? Isn’t there something unsatisfied in them
to the last? Have they been entirely gratified? Can one ever have in
this world the peace promised? Maybe we do at the last moment. I am
expecting it then. But one moment, with your breath already leaving
you, is a short time to enjoy what you have spent a lifetime to win.

As near as I can make out, we cannot obey the Scriptures and be as
much like the Lord as we claim to be. There is too much submission,
too much bondage to sacrifice. We do not seem to have arrived yet at
that almighty mental poise where we can punish as He does. Vengeance is
still His. Our minds have dropped a stitch somewhere between the Ten
Commandments and that beatitude which reads: ‘Blessed are ye, when men
shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil
against you, for my sake, ... for great is your reward in heaven.’

We are short on giving out these rewards. Maybe we are still so vicious
it would not be safe to trust us with administering justice one to
another according to the Lord’s way. We must go to a court and get
balled up with an attorney to obtain our rights, and maybe have the
decision go against us. Or we must go to a church conference and get
balled up with the presiding elder and get very little satisfaction
there for our wrongs compared to the way we could satisfy ourselves
if it were not for sitting down dutifully and being persecuted for
righteousness’ sake. Maybe we should go on turning the other cheek a
while longer; but my experience has been that there is very little
gratification of the vanity of the human soul in turning the other
cheek, or giving a man your coat also because he took your cloak. It
leaves you naked, cold, and bruised in the face, and the other fellow
strutting around bragging at your expense. Compare that with the way
the Lord punishes evildoers and you get an inkling of what I mean--and
the chief reason why I am writing this history. My mind has misled me
frequently through the Scriptures.




VIII

BOOK LEARNING


Ignorance is a curse, but it depends upon what kind of knowledge
you get whether that is not even more of a curse. For this reason I
have become a bit squeamish about education. Occasionally, when I am
suffering from the effects of some regrettable wisdom I have acquired,
the very sight or sound of the word gives me a sinking sensation, as
one feels when reminded of fate. It smacks too much of Calvinism, a
willful, worldly form of predestination by which the mind, morals, and
future of a youth are determined. We can teach him a lie by concealing
part of the truth, knob him like a hydra-horned monster with false
ideals and he has no defense. We can substitute a code of ethics
for religion without letting him know that ethics is a variable and
frequently very free translation we make of the will of God in the
minds of men.

The product of such a system of education we have in the present
generation of young people. They are being deprived of their legal
relations to the Almighty. They are running true to form, predestined
to their courses by what they have not been taught, obedience to that
law which we older people call God. To be brought up illiterate in the
spirit seems to me a frightful state of ignorance and very dangerous. I
prefer real Calvinism, though I was born and bred a Methodist, because
according to that old doctrine some of us at least were elected to
salvation.

Methods of education were much more primitive when I was a child.
You learned your Catechism and the Ten Commandments first; then your
alphabet. I knew who made the heavens and the earth, that Adam was the
first man and Eve the first woman, before I was five years old; but
I must have been nearly six before I could distinguish between the
little _b_ and the little _d_ of the alphabet. They seemed very small
and negligible compared with the hills and skies and trees to which I
had been accustomed. I was frightfully lonely with my a, b, abs. What
I spelled out by the hardest was not interesting. I had the prescience
of all things and must now be turned back to learn little words in a
book that I had always used in speaking. I could not be impressed when
w-h-a-t turned out to be ‘what.’ I lacked the erudite instinct which
makes scholars.

My only interest in words to-day is to find the one needed, preferably
a small one; young, active, and properly colored to use for expressing
that feeling which became a thought, if you can say it or write
it down. I have never had the least cultural curiosity about the
ancestry of a word, whether Greek or Latin or even older, though I
have sometimes had the feeling that I might be using a smooth, wise
word which had formerly been in the employ of Socrates. But never one
accustomed to Marcus Aurelius’s way of thinking--a good man as pagans
go, but reduced to a negative state by the quality of his spirit.

I have often wondered if literary people as a class show any aptitude
for grammar in their youth. My suspicion is that it is chiefly those
who speak correctly--you may say, from a sense of duty; not naturally,
nor with any charm--who take to the drudgery of studying English
composition. They are of that class who read your book, not for
the taste or flavor of the story you tell, but to find a misplaced
adverb or the tail of a participle sticking out in the wrong place.
Meanness of mind can sink no lower than this, because it is clothed in
such outrageous respectability. You cannot call him a hypocrite for
directing your attention to a grammatical error on the one hundred and
twenty-fifth page of your narrative; yet he is one, plucking at the
mote of an outlawed word with a beam in his own eye. I never knew one
who could write an interesting sentence, though a child could parse it.

The only indication I showed of literary sense from the beginning was
a distaste for the study of grammar. I remember how small I was, and
how desolate, being obliged to sit in the house and learn a lesson in
Smith’s English Grammar. And it is still a queer thing from my point
of view that men have been burned at the stake for choosing their own
doctrines from the Scriptures; but so far as I know, the author of
a textbook designed to cower the mind of a child has never suffered
martyrdom. I am not implying a disposition to thrust a blazing fagot
into the beard of a professional grammarian; but it does seem strange
when you think about it that no man has ever been punished for devising
textbook tortures for children.

My only recollections of this book were the punishments I received
because it remained a mystery to me, and the number of hard and fast
rules in it that I learned but could not apply. When it was done and
over with, the residuum of information left in my mind never to be
forgotten was that ‘Active verbs govern the objective case.’ I have
noticed that they do in every walk of life. In those days I developed a
personal sympathy for the noun in the objective case. It was frequently
knocked down and trampled upon by the noun in the nominative case. It
was the victim of an active verb.

By this time I have my own ideas about the virtue and value of words.
Their worth depends entirely upon the person who uses them. They betray
more than the mind; they betray the man. The somnambulant charm of De
Quincey’s writings was due to his constant use of the passive verb.
They are nearly all drugged and recumbent. There are peaks of the
purest inspiration in Whitman’s poetry, rough tablelands that stretch
away into light and darkness, written with a rhythm of words so harsh
and strong that one hears the hoarse shouts of a man with a great
and joyful heart. But the lowlands of his thoughts are covered with
a growth of monstrous words. My belief is that those who revere him
as a poet quote him less often on this account than his ostentatious
disciples who camp most frequently in the lower regions of his genius.

And there are the decadent writers who use words frequently that bloom
like fair frail blossoms on a dung heap--but always a line somewhere
which betrays the odor of the soil.

The reason why the minor poets are minor is because the thoughts they
have can only be sung in slender, pale, poignant words. It is not
beauty they express so much as frailty. Poe’s tales and poetry always
fascinated me, but they reveal the dipsomaniacal genius of the man.

David was shrewder than a psalmist is supposed to be when he cried
out, ‘Oh ... that mine enemy had written a book!’ I do not know how
the theologians interpret this passage, but it is perfectly clear to
me that David was no mean psychologist. No man ever wrote a book that
did not betray him if you know how to read it. If he has an illiterate
nature and all the words at a scholar’s command, the thing he writes
may be useful like a record; but it will not have the convincing charm
of life. He sustains the same relation to literature that a ploughman
does to a painter, an artisan to an architect--useful, but not nearly
so interesting to know.

As for the mere grammar of language, it is essential if you have no
ear for composing a sentence, as notes are for one who has no ear for
music and must strum it as it is written for him. I am deficient there,
having no skill in the harmonies of singing sounds; but I came out of
ten generations of men who used words as the winds use the clouds,
roughly or gently, according to the velocity of their moods. And I
contend that there are some things to be said so quickly by way of
interpreting a man or a meaning that if you stop long enough to reduce
it to a parsing symmetry you have lost the breath of life in the truth
you meant to convey.

Compared with the modern child, I was stupid. I did not know anything.
I was simply a medium of sensations, experiencing joy in the sun,
living confidentially with the grass, moved to this or that adventure
as the wind blows. I was without self-consciousness, that first
symptom of vanity in a mind beginning to be, so attractive in young
children, so offensive in men and women. I was strangely lacking in
the monkey curiosity peculiar to the bright child. I came silently by
my own knowledge without asking questions. There was no sense in what
I learned, but much enchantment. I was closer kin to the earth than
mere mind ever makes us. I knew the leaves on the trees as you hear
conversation, and the sky was very near, like a roof over my head.




IX

SCHOOL DAYS


I attended the old field school at broken intervals in these days. What
I remember about that is the path across the hills to this school, the
scent of ripe maypops in the long grass, the passion flowers blooming
like lace among the corn, dew on everything; the way the gray gables
of the schoolhouse showed against the sky, the little winds that
accompanied me on summer days fragrant as the breath of the fields.
They are like verses I learned long ago. If I need one in a cheerful
tale now I always go back and copy the little a-b-c breeze that used
to blow the grass into billows and turn the leaves on a certain poplar
tree like a thousand tiny silver fans as we went by together.

Once when I was very young I was sent to the village school and came
for the first time in contact with the bold alacrity of the children
of the world, a very small world, but strange to me. They must have
bragged and boasted. Anyway, for the first time I remember being
troubled about my financial standing. I did not know whether my parents
were rich people or poor people, but it was apparent that there was
great satisfaction to be had from riches. Still, it was a delicate
matter, upon which I was loath to consult mother, who seemed to be
above such trivial considerations. One day when I could bear my anxiety
no longer I devoted myself secretly, like an expert accountant, to the
business of estimating the worth of our estate and determining once for
all the financial standing of my family. Followed such a feat of memory
as rarely has been equaled since Adam named all the beasts of the field
at one sitting. I forgot nothing, from father’s old army shawl to the
thousands of acres of land in the plantation. My scale of valuation
was eccentric, but exceedingly gratifying. We were very rich people, I
decided, although I doubt if I had ever seen a piece of money at this
time. We had servants and land and were really poverty-stricken.

It is a good thing to be born poor with an opulent mind. Fluctuations
in market values have less effect upon your strictly private fortune.
Wealth is a state of mind which many a rich man misses. I have no idea
how long I retained this notion of being an heiress, but I am moved to
tears and laughter by the quiet assurance I had, based upon our wealth,
to which I never referred. Children are very shrewd about preserving
their illusions. They conceal them from the diminishing knowledge of
others. I am wondering what might have happened if my young companions
had suspected the source of my ease and pride. And what would have been
the effect upon me if I had realized how anguishingly poor we were?

After all, it was not such a bad way to grow up--next door to the
kingdom of Heaven, believing myself to be the heir of a great fortune
and descended from great people.

I may have acquired some mettle of the spirit in these purely
imaginary circumstances which enabled me to bear with a better grace
the vicissitudes of the direst poverty later on, for I have never
felt poor. If I had a nickel in the machine drawer, I was doing very
well; if my husband had a dollar in his pocket, want and anxiety were
comfortably removed.

What I remember about myself during this period is different and more
engaging. It seems to me that from being a shy, silent child I became a
genial little girl. I remember jumping the rope at school and sharing
a playhouse under the trees with another little girl. But these were
diversions natural to my age, as a kitten chases its tail when not
otherwise occupied. I recall much more distinctly the satisfaction
with which I parted from these companions and took the lonely path
home across the fields. I had the happier feeling of being very much
abroad then as a bird must have on the wing in a wide space. I remember
the habit I had later on of walking in the flower garden late in the
evening until mother called me. I am certain that this was a kind
of enchantment I practiced, for I have no recollection of thinking
anything right or wrong, but only of feeling like a part of everything;
not that I could have defined the sensation then.

This habit of walking alone late in the evening has remained with me.
Sometimes for years it may be broken by circumstances or inevitable
companionships, only to be resumed again with precisely the same
somnambulant happiness I had when I was young. As near as I can tell
now, it is like resting from being mortal and old and tired. It is like
escaping from the weary consciousness of your own life, narrow and
familiar and full of thoughts that take hold of you like hands. Maybe
it is a little Enoch period I enjoy of not being.

My first appearance on the stage was during a school commencement
about this time. I was in a dialogue composed of little girls who were
supposed to impersonate flowers--the rose, the violet, the lily, for
example. I was the tulip. When my turn came to tell how it felt and
what it meant to be a tulip, I was so deeply moved that I had to be led
from the stage in tears. But I had felt the glare of the footlights in
my face and craved the opportunity to appear on the stage. My desire
was not to show off, but to move the audience. I had the true artistic
impulse.

There was a poem written about that time purporting to be the Lament
of the Empress Eugénie over the death of her son. The first line of it
ran: ‘Waileth a woman, “Oh, my God!”’ I remember smiting a cheerful
commencement audience one night with this thing, delivered in a voice
which ranged from soprano to a sobbing whisper, and with gestures of
the wildest grief. I suppose the poor empress conducted herself with
dignity in her sorrow, but whatever she said or did, she could not have
equaled my interpretation of her woe. The performance was received in
petrified silence, but I still believe the audience might have cheered
if it had not been so startled by the activity of my emotions.

I am probably the only person living who believes that I had histrionic
ability of no mean order. But I have never regretted missing the career
of a great tragedienne, on account of the well-known perversity and
stupidity of audiences. Sometimes they are elegant mobs who slay you
by omitting the encore. They are the majority and hold your fate in
their hands at every performance. But if you write a book, you are
the silent majority. The book keeps going the rounds, speaking your
mind, and you are not present when the reader or critic damns it. You
are probably writing another book. I prefer the safety and remoteness
of authorship, if for no other reason than that one may go on writing
no matter how she looks, whether she has a distinguishable waistline
or not, long after the tragedy queen has lost her beauty and has been
obliged to retire, probably in straitened circumstances on account of
the extravagant habits she acquired during her affluent period in the
theatrical profession. Authors rarely are successful enough to develop
their spendthrift talents.




X

WHAT I READ


I was in and out of school until my seventeenth year. Toward the last
I must have had queer teachers, or I may have been a trifle out of
drawing myself, for I was permitted to choose the books I studied from
father’s library. This was an old and honorable one, collected by two
generations of leisure-loving men with reading minds. I recited lessons
from Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ and Paley’s ‘Moral Philosophy.’ Poor old Paley!
It turns out that he was entirely wrong about morals. I doubt now if
it makes much difference whose philosophy you study on this subject.
Morals change like rules for pronunciation, and are more confusing to
learn than a foreign language. When you know the language you know how
to speak it, but one never gets a working knowledge of morals until he
learns how to compromise them with a good conscience and an upright
mind. It is an obtuse subject and requires much experience in honorable
living to master it.

Another book I studied was Tasso’s ‘Jerusalem Delivered.’ Why I chose
this poem I cannot imagine, but it has left a trail of flaming angels
at war, memories of many flashing colors, and a sort of golden cadence
in my mind, although I cannot recall a single line. What I do recall,
with that mischievous retrospect we sometimes cast back upon our
earliest follies, is the way the good little lady teacher used to look
when I switched forward to read from this book. She used to turn her
head sidewise with that weary air polite people have when they must
listen to a bore. I always let her have as many pages of the stuff as
she would bear.

I have spent a good deal of my life beyond the bounds of the times in
which we now live. Most people do who read and think without adding
the experience as a fact to their consciousness. If life is brief, I
shall never know it. I am not really old in years, but it seems to me
that I have been living for ages. Much of my youth was passed a long
way back in the centuries. I had a widely assorted companionship then,
reaching all the way back to Genesis. Besides the first and closest
relation I acquired with Nature, there were the prophets from the Old
Testament; pagans of one sort and another from histories of the Greeks
and Romans; heroes chosen from poetry and mythology; ghosts, angels of
the covenant, Jesus Christ, with a sort of secret hankering for many of
the Catholic saints, whose lives had drawn me to them.

These people were amazingly real to me, because I did not know any
living people so intimately. The topography of my mind must have been
a curious map of ancient lands. Years later, when at last I saw Rome,
really it was a disappointment to me; the shattered shell of a great
civilization left half buried in the dust of centuries, a frailer,
unsubstantial city built into these ruins and filled with little men.
No gods on Mount Olympus. I am a Christian, but I did miss the altars
and oracles of those fine old deities in Rome! The sunken place where
the Forum had been, but no signs of Lycurgus or of Cæsar.

We never shall know how many great men were created by their
biographers, but we may infer how insignificant these same men would be
twenty centuries later. I do not think Brutus or Mark Antony would cut
much of a figure in the Rome I saw. Still, I have a sort of sympathy
for Mussolini, not with him. A modern politician giving himself
the airs of a Roman tribune. Who knows but he may be the whelp of
atavism? Grant him a Plutarch for a biographer and he might shine for
centuries to come as a great man. After a while, it all depends on your
biographer whether you live in the memories of men or are forgotten
along with the rest of us.

The people I knew in those days stalked through the Scriptures, or they
had been poets and gifted men, according to their biographers.

I was not conscious of being different from others of my own age; but
I must have been, now that I consider what substance my mind was made
of, what scenes my imagination dwelt upon--creation, the slow-traveling
patriarch of the Scriptures. I was not allowed to read fiction, but I
read a translation of the tragedies by Sophocles. To this day I still
have a clearer memory of one scene in the ‘Œdipus at Colonus’ than of
anything I have ever seen acted upon the stage. Œdipus, eyes cut out
with Jocasta’s golden buckle, with bloody cheeks and beard, standing
above her dead body, and the halls of the palace filled with wailing
women and woe-stricken men.

This is terrible stuff to be laid away in the mind of a young girl.
Later I added ‘Prometheus Bound.’ And after so long a time, out of the
memory of such scenes, I found out what tragedy is if you write it--an
act of fate which we perform unwillingly or without knowing what we do.
Terribly simple, in a bleak place, or in a place of great splendor like
a palace; all in the scene, not to be told in many words.

Along with this I read Dean Swift, Sut Lovingood and Byron’s poetry.
Mother was no great reader. I doubt if she knew of some of the lands
through which Gulliver traveled, and my impression is that she thought
all poetry was virtuous.

I must have acquired a certain boldness of mind from these various
sources in an age when the maiden mind was actually tainted with
modesty. In reading a Latin fable I was the only girl in the class
who would translate the word ‘_asinus_’ into the little English
word it means. I remember this instance on account of the blushing
embarrassment of my companions. I was not aware of the almost universal
existence of the vulgar.




XI

THE TEACHER I HAD


I am passing briefly through the educational period of my life. It
was relatively unimportant. Textbooks may furnish a good setting-up
exercise for the strengthening of the mind; but if one takes them
seriously, or imagines they furnish him with the things he should know
along the way he must go, they are injurious. It is a fearful thing to
be stitched up and certified in a common-school education and later
sold out of a university into the markets for what you are worth or
not worth to the world. You have really no wisdom of your own. Your
mind is a short or long pattern of other men’s thoughts, theories, and
convictions. You aren’t anything but an addled egg of information, or a
good one that must be hatched later into a mind of your own.

I am not opposed to education, you understand, but to the way we get
it. The best ones in my opinion are obtained as a man makes his own
living, by work and experience. I would rather learn from a great man
or woman traveling a wind-swept road than to study all the textbooks in
a school taught by a little fellow who knows the whole course. This is
my objection to schools, all the way from the primary grades through
the universities. The teachers may be scholars, but they are rarely
great men. They have nothing of themselves to impart that is worth
emulating. If so they do not impart it. Teaching is a business, not a
process of inspiration.

The teachers I had must have been amazingly patient with me, but never
in the way of discipline. I reeked with learning in those days; I was
at the puppy-leg stage of my intellectual development, not steady in my
mental wobblings, but ravenous for the bones of other men’s thoughts
and too much absorbed to practice the pranks of the average young
person in school.

I read more Latin than now is required in a college course, but it
was only a way I had of making the ancient dust fly through Virgil,
Horace, and the rest of those orators and poets who lay so safely
buried centuries deep in their fame. I doubt if I dealt honestly with
the moods and tenses of their verbs. There was some mystery about the
dative case which I never tried to fathom. If I derived any benefit
from these remarkably free translations, it was the practice I had
in the valiant and unscrupulous use of words for translating my own
thoughts later on. However it may be for others, this has been for me
more difficult than translating the most obtuse Latin sentence. Horace
was dead and could not protest; but being alive and exacting, I fared
worse at my own hands. To find the right words for an idea that ought
to have wings and tail feathers is an art I have never mastered. But
if by chance one such thought does rise living and winged, I have an
inkling of how the Lord must have felt when the first lark He made rose
upon its wings with a song in its throat.

No human has the right to feel so gratified with his own performance,
but our real feelings are rarely governed so strictly by modesty as
we pretend they are when another man praises us. Modesty is often the
hand we throw up to ward off his smashing blow if he should suspect how
conceited we are. What I mean is that thoughts really are miracles, and
it gives you a secret sensation of amazement and joy to get one of the
things out of the far reaches of wisdom, disentangled from your past
and your hereafter and set down in a few simple words which bequeath it
to mankind.

I have done a lot of presumptuous thinking along this line, sneaking
around the outer edges of creation, trying to stretch up to sensations
not really lawful to know. Sometimes, taking a look above and abroad in
a star-blossoming night, I miss the prideful humility of David when he
exclaimed, ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the
moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou
art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him?’ What I
am tempted to wonder is how the Almighty feels when a brand-new star
slips out into his infinities and swings obedient forever to the first
sun that draws it. And how does He take it when one of these stars He
has ordained wobbles in its orbit and shoots off into space until it is
dissolved like a dust ball?

I do not suppose it makes much difference. The thing is not wasted,
only a trifle more dust to be gathered in passing by the other planets.
Some time has elapsed since we have had a certified measurement of the
circumference of the earth. Apt as not it is a much larger heavenly
body than it used to be, or smaller, packed tighter from revolving
so fast for so many million years. We cannot rise far enough above
it or scratch deep enough into it to find out much about it, and our
thoughts remain as far from His thoughts as the East is from the West,
and God still is the name of what we do not know, but must believe to
live. Still, I have this hankering after the streaming glories of His
mind. I do not care a thing about being a little lower than the angels
and crowned with glory. These are competitive values. What I want is
the power to think myself into the order and majesty of His peace, so
filled with energy and what we call love, which undoubtedly must be the
law of the whole thing.

Prophets always look ahead when they prophesy. No man can look behind
him and tell what might have happened, because what did happen has
obscured the view. I have no idea what kind of mind and life I might
have had if I had enjoyed the same religious freedom in my youth that I
had in choosing the texts I studied. My guess now is that I should have
been a very different person, and not nearly so legible morally. Still,
if I had had more religious liberty during these formative years, I
might have escaped that tightening of the conscience into a sense of
guilt from which I have suffered most of my life.




XII

THE ‘REBEL’S’ CHILD


My memory is eclectic, so to speak, and would never retain what was
repugnant to me, especially in the way of education. I have forgotten
most of the multiplication table. The algebraic figure of speech,
_×_, is still an unknown quantity to me, though I remember passing
creditable examinations in this study. There must have been something
wrong with the teachers I had.

Ridpath’s ‘History of the United States’ was the first book I ever
read. Vanity was the inspiration of this undertaking. I had been
brought up on glorious family legends and I expected to find the
volume thickly populated with my ancestors. But it was not. This is
characteristic of historians; they omit many men famous in their
own families. I think it accounts for the growth and development of
the Colonial Dames and the various orders of Daughters. You may set
out your family tree in any one of these organizations and enjoy
the distinction of being somebody in spite of the negligence of the
historians.

After all, I was destined never to finish reading Ridpath’s history.
I was halted at the Battle of Gettysburg on account of a terrible and
unexpected censorship.

Father had been such a good soldier that he was never obliged to boast
of his war record until he was a very old man and was compelled to
fan up his past glories to confound the current generation of his
posterity who fought in gas masks from dugouts during the World War.
I was therefore a disciple of Ridpath without sectional animus. I was
ignorant of the opprobrious reputation the word ‘rebel’ had in the
South. The probability is that I had never heard it spoken, as bad
language is not used in the best society.

One night we were at the supper table. I was still sitting on the
dictionary in the bottom of my chair in order to be sufficiently
elevated for the proper use of my knife and fork. But I had been
reading Ridpath that day and suddenly showed forth with some childish
remark about what had been done to the rebel army at Gettysburg.

It was as if I had cast a bomb in the midst of this peaceful scene.
Mother turned pale and stared at me as if she felt a serpent in her
bosom.

‘Rebel?’ shouted father.

I died beneath his gaze, but kept my eyes open, fascinated by the noble
rage that seemed to transform him. He stood up, cast his chair from
him, ground his teeth, swept a gesture that made the candle flicker,
folded his arms and strode back and forth, lashing the tail of his fury.

He called upon God to witness his sorrow that a man should live to hear
his own child call him a rebel!

I keened my nose and wept, still wondering why rebel should be a bad
name.

Father laid his hand upon my head and forgave me with a sob. After all,
he said, it was not my fault that an honest man who had suffered,
bled and died twice for his country, should be set down in history as
a rebel. His unfortunate child was the victim of a partisan historian.
Where was that book?

I slid hastily from my seat and ran to fetch the iniquitous volume.
Mother had purchased it from a book agent without suspecting how the
author had branded her husband and all brave men of the South.

Father opened it, stared at the printed pages, wrinkled his nose,
snarled his lip as if he literally smelled the meanness of ignoble
truth, gripped it in his two hands, tore it asunder and tossed
it through the open window behind him, the pages still tittering
maliciously as they fluttered down.

Followed the first and only address I ever heard on the Lost Cause,
impassioned, and, I still believe, veracious. He let me have the
facts--state sovereignty, slavery, secession--his own part in the
struggle. He opened his wounds and bled afresh. Did I see his
feet--halting before me and standing at attention upon these members.
He had marched without shoes through the snows of Virginia and left his
tracks there written in blood! He had slept in this snow without so
much as a shawl to cover him. He had fought all day and all night when
he was sick from hunger. And he’d never been shot in the back! Only to
be besmirched with the title of ‘rebel’!

Socrates about to die had nothing on him in the way of eloquence,
though he may have surpassed father in the logic of his defense. But
watch the world; it is ever more easily stirred and convinced by
oratory than by logic.

Sitting with my hands clasped in an ecstasy of all emotions attendant
upon such a ministry, I was born again and confirmed in the doctrines
of my own people. I have let it all go long since. I have praised
Lincoln and Grant--not Sherman, of course, though he may deserve it
from another point of view--but it has been, you may say, in the way of
good sportsmanship. The fact that the South was wrong will never make
the methods of the North seem right to me. I doubt now if any means
used which result in war can be right. It comes to me now that the men
of the North and the men of the South never were enemies. They fought
like growing brothers during the Civil War, leaving no malice behind.
It was the ethics practiced by the carpetbaggers that estranged the two
sections.




XIII

NEW ENGLAND AND THE SOUTH


I can look back through the whole of my life at incidents like this
hour with my father which bent the twig of my mind and determined the
very nature of my thinking even after I outgrew my prejudices. Thus
to this day it impresses me as a queer coincidence that altruism, of
all things, flared up about that time in New England. Very few of us
realize the fact, but it is a sort of instinct to cover the deepest
transgression with a canopy of high-mindedness. If you are a man, it
is safer and more veracious not to speak too nobly of your own nature,
nor to spread the wing of your soul too far. The weather changes and
you come down in a bad place. Here in the South we are not good; but
that is the point--we do not pretend to be. Instead of hiding behind
altruism, we have permitted the world to capitalize our faults. This
has been good for us. We have fewer faults than if we had lived
according to a self-deceiving pose.

Time has proved us.

Personally, I prefer to have descended from those Virginia colonists
who came to this country of their own free will, like hardy
swashbuckling adventurers. They appear to me to have had more ease
of mind, better manners, and finer qualities than fighting over
doctrines ever imparts. But the Pilgrims, who came to escape religious
persecution, were very good people. They were a bit wasp-waisted in
their pieties, but they had a sublime courage for enduring hardship.
They were the raw-boned element of Protestantism, essential to the
life of a new nation in a new hemisphere, and if it had not been for
persecution in England they would not have come. This country might
have been settled as it is now being gorged by the overflow populations
of Europe. Such people never make a civilization. Their instinct is
to destroy it. So we must be thankful that enough of the hardiest and
bravest Protestants were driven out to start life decently here, thus
giving us two hundred years in which to mold and harden a civilization
needed now to withstand the disasters of Europe.

But these people were encompassed about by the will of God. They were
obliged by the everlasting order of things to survive their faults
and to acquire the right virtues, as we all must do or perish. So the
New England colonists stopped hanging witches and modified their blue
laws. And the Virginia blades settled down and went to work. But they
must have suffered cruelly for the harshness of their beliefs. History
proves that the effects of theology differ dangerously from those of
religion upon the characters of men. One reduces religion to formulas,
doctrines, and creeds; the other lifts men by some simple wisdom of the
heart to a sort of nobler goodness, kin to God.

We may perform one of those acts of impromptu justice called a
lynching, which is reprehensible, but not so bad as the torturing and
slaying of forty innocent men by mob violence, crimes that are more
and more frequently committed in other sections. Many a time men and
women of New England have felt obliged to tell me that they would not
dare to live in the lawless South, no doubt with the best altruistic
intentions of bringing home to me the realization of the dangerous
conditions we have produced down here. Now it turns out that the South
is the safest place to live in this country. It is the wisest place
to build factories and start industries, because it is easier to
obtain labor and control labor here. We are about to be swamped and
capitalized by money and immigrants from the North. It is a terrible
situation, because there is no way of limiting the quota, say from New
England, as the national Government limits those from desperate Europe.
Personally, I prefer the peace and poverty we now enjoy to the thrift,
energy, and wealth these people insure. Presently we shall have here
the same disorders and problems that greed and altruism have bred in
the North, East, and West. Time changes the condition of people, but
not their nature or their disposition. The people of the North, whether
they are Christians, capitalists, or the sons of carpetbaggers, have a
talent for meddling with the social, intellectual, and commercial life
of the South, and the nobler they are the more they meddle. It is one
of the characteristics of greatness of soul. This provincial state of
mind is bound to affect the quality of their piety.

They have more sense than we have, but they are pathetically deficient
in that deeper wit of understanding. They understand nothing but
their own minds and their own wills. They are artlessly hypocritical
in their relations to us. Having failed to uplift their own masses
spiritually or morally, they are on a religious trek constantly toward
this section. Their world is not our world; their God is not our God.
We are a warmer, kinder, more spiritually minded people, therefore more
patient with their chastening efforts in our behalf than, say, the West
would be.

The awful thing always characteristic of them is their desire and
determination to govern and take all the credit for everything
accomplished. I do not think a union between the Northern and Southern
Methodist Church would be any more successful, except in a financial
way, than any other government set up by a foreign people who had the
balance of power. And religion consists in no such circumstance. I
have my very grave doubts as to whether the great body of Methodists
in the South favor this contemplated corporation of the two churches.
The thing is being engineered by the politicians and princes of these
respective organizations.




XIV

CERTAIN LIES


According to my way of thinking, one of the most engaging charms I
had as a child was the simplicity with which I lied. I was totally
deficient in the arts of deceit, but the slightest moral pressure
from mother sent me flying to cover behind a perfectly transparent
falsehood. I have known many a man to practice prevarication in his
pacifying relations to a woman. They choose this method of childish
fiction in dealing with women through some simplicity of their own
psychology. And it is the secret which nearly every woman keeps that
her experience with her youngest child and her husband are very similar
in this matter. But no such thing is characteristic of the pussyfooting
feminine mind. We are much smarter in merely twisting the truth than
in lying. Maybe I was too young then to have developed the gender of
my faculties. My peculiarity was that once I had committed myself to
a falsehood I would not confess the truth, nor any part of the truth.
Neither prayers nor punishment could move me. My own notion is that
this was due to some kind of misdirected self-respect. To this day I
have a well-bred horror of confessing.

But mother believed that it was innate depravity and took measures
accordingly. One day when I had told a fib and stuck to it, much
evidence to the contrary, she took the Bible and read from it that
passage which says, ‘All liars have their portion in hell.’

I was not the same after that. I had a conscience which humbled me, and
a very real fear of the place lurid with flames where the worm dieth
not and liars inherit a certain portion. I was the wicked. My sins
accompanied me like a still, small tune. I began the hectic life of
indulging in sprees of goodness. I would be very industrious or very
thoughtful for a day, but I never could hold any high moral note in
living. To this day I hate objective righteousness as every true artist
hates drudgery. I am not denying that faith without works is dead;
but good deeds, even the very virtues by which you are recognized and
praised, frequently adorn a Pharisee.

I have often wondered if all children pass through a period of joyfully
achieving innocence. They are not good, but what freedom there must
be in not being able to think evil! Maybe Shakespeare was right:
‘’Tis thinking makes it so.’ Certainly it is written of children in
the Scriptures, ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven.’ Which suggests an
idea of Heaven I have never seen advanced by a theologian--that it is
a place of infinite relief where one may be as unscrupulously busy as
a child without doing anything wrong. But we could not risk living
in this present world with a generation of such Kingdom-of-Heaven
saints. A man with that much innocence in him would be an outlaw.
So it may have been all for the best, the mill and anguish I passed
through getting my mind and virtues to fit me and that sum of human
heinousness so essential to surviving here.

Guilt must be the parent of the moral sense. We are not born with
it. We are born innocent and very dangerous. Then slowly, or quite
unexpectedly, we receive that first spiritual perception of ourselves;
a guilty feeling that weighs us down, never again to be so free, never
again to be the same assured heir of all the stars and half brothers to
the angels of God. We call it the voice of conscience, but I am telling
you it is the sense of guilt, a ticker in your breast warning you of
the change in the value of your virtues, recording the loss of one.
It is a good thing, but very painful. I think most of the activities
we engage in are due to the effort to escape it. One of the salvation
promises is that we shall be delivered from it in the world to come.
I do not know about that. I have prayed so often to be delivered from
my sins and trespasses, it is inconceivable to me that I could develop
very virtuously anywhere without them to brace me morally. I believe in
eternal life, but I should feel queer, finished and laid aside, without
my temptations to worry me onward and upward from within.

Far be it from me to question the goodness of God because evil
is present with us! We should never have the honor of choosing
righteousness for ourselves without it. Who would be charitable if
no one was in need of charity? Who would know how to practice mercy,
forgiveness, and long-suffering if there were no faults or weakness in
others to forgive? And how in heaven shall we be able to use all these
virtues so hardly acquired here if there is no occasion to exercise
them in heaven? How can we possibly enjoy ourselves where all the other
saints are as good as we are and no distinctions made?

We derive more satisfaction than we realize from successful competition
with our fellow men in righteousness. I offer no solution; I merely ask
these questions of those people who look forward with joy to eternal
life without one single familiar thing in prospect to occupy their
minds during this infinite stretch of time. As for me, I trust the Lord
to make my everlasting life even more interesting than this short one,
which has certainly been a feverishly exciting experience. I cannot
help hoping there will be a few of the dearer sinners in heaven upon
whom one may practice a little encouragement. And I hope there will be
tremendous saints also whose attainments far outshine mine, so that
I may have the honor of associating with them, as we are proud to be
recognized here by great men who have surpassed us in the victories and
laurels they have won.




XV

REPUTATION


We make reputations long before we suspect that we have any such
comet’s tail of public opinion attached to us. We leave ridiculous
caricatures of ourselves along the way, which illustrated tragedies in
our lives at the time. Later we come upon these records and pictures
and are rarely ever pleased. But somebody has kept them for you, and
somebody will remind you of them one day when you are sitting on your
pinnacle.

I have been painfully reminded of such things, such as the time in
my early school days when I wore the wrong little girl’s bonnet and
came home with boogers in my hair, the frightful ordeal my head passed
through, and mother’s tears. She was a woman who made mountains of her
mole-hills and then climbed them, dragging me, miserable, after her.
I lived a very sensational life with her morally on this account. I
remember the almost fainting state of humiliation I fell in on this
occasion, because it seemed I was the only child in the whole history
of her family that had ever contracted these disgraceful insects. I
have also been obliged to recall how I learned to play cards under the
schoolhouse, never having seen such things before, nor dreaming that
they were the devil’s own deck of sins. This business lasted a week,
and I cleaned up all the available property of my companions, chiefly
slate pencils. Then one of the heaviest losers virtuously betrayed me
to my grandfather, a stern old man who knew more than I did about the
iniquitous gift of gambling in my immediate family.

There was a terrible scene, and I was obliged to stand beside the
marble-top center table in the parlor, lay my hand on the Bible and
swear solemnly never to play cards again. I have kept this vow. The
little girl who betrayed me is a grandmother now, an exemplary woman
who indulges in nothing worse than a social game of bridge.

I might easily have forgotten these and many other diminishing
incidents of my childhood but for the fact that they are treasured
in the archives of the family with parsimonious care. If you wish
to collect complimentary material for a record of yourself, never
appeal to your relations. They may be proud of you as an asset to the
family name, but they have a gift for remembering your gawky period
privately, the follies and faults you committed and have forgotten.
You may have come up in the world with a laurel on your brow, but if
you go back home forty years later wearing two laurels on your brow,
and a noble expression, they will miss the point. What you are only
serves to remind them of the little snub-nosed girl you used to be.
They are determined to remember that you are dust. No matter how well
you conduct yourself, you cannot fix their attention on your virtues or
your fame, but they remember how you looked in a long-tailed ruffled
basque and full skirt when you were eight years old. Or how you grew up
to be very sarcastic, and the impudent thing you said to the Baptist
preacher who wanted to proselyte you just after you were converted,
meaning that the sting of my tongue had not been changed by conversion.

I do not think they mean any harm. They are simply keeping you where
you belong in the family no matter where you belong in literature.
Still, I would have preferred not to have become such a surprise to
these people who knew me in the beginning. It does seem queer that none
of them suspected the kind of youngster I really was. I could write a
very serviceable anthology on family relations; but it is wiser not to
do so, because some of them are bound to survive me and have the last
word. It would be truthful but misleading.




XVI

‘BEAUTIFUL AND PRECIOUS’


The older I grow the more beautiful and precious life seems to me.
The time will come, I know, when there will be nothing else to pray
for except life and everlasting life. Give me that and an even break
between joys and vicissitudes, the same right I have here to choose
goodness, and I would cheerfully risk existence longer than a pious
saint could stand with folded wings singing in heaven. But I know very
little about this. Maybe I shall be changed when my corruption puts
on incorruption, acclimated to all this music and brightness and the
high level of perfect goodness. In the meantime, surely the Lord will
respect my honesty in clinging to my human feelings, since I am subject
to them according to His will.

I do not know how it is, but there is a doctrine which teaches
damnation like consequences in all the churches with which I
am familiar, either by election or predestination--terms which
distinctly imply the exclusion from salvation of those not elected or
predestined. I can find no Scripture in the Bible that justifies these
interpretations without giving the passage a theological twist. The
Methodist church, which makes such generous provision for salvaging
and saving those who fall from grace, is not without blame in this
matter. It covers the whole ground for the doctrines of election and
predestined damnation, or salvation as the case may be, with the
doctrine of apostasy. The only difference is that an apostate chooses
his own fate and is not predestined to it from the foundation of the
world. This is only apparently putting the blame where it belongs. The
threat hidden beneath is that the Lord will stand just so much, then
His spirit ceases to strive with a man. When you think about it, this
is the worst fate of all. What is to defend a person highly sensitized
spiritually from the perpetual fear of being forsaken in his sins?

I had my first lesson in theology very early--religion is something
else. If you have the mind to believe, the Scriptures are singularly
clear; but only a student and a scholar can make heads and tails of
theology. It is a sort of puzzle the wavering minds of men have made
from the Word of God, to the end that sinners have been exalted by
a creed, saints burned at the stake for the sake of a doctrine, and
thousands obliged to flee from one country to another to save their
necks and their liberty of conscience.

Maybe all that was for the best. Certainly, if you give it time, the
worst turns out for the best.

Mother was the kind of Methodist who could afford to believe without
much personal anxiety in this doctrine. She was a truly good woman,
with an Old Testament mind. Somewhere along the way she warned me
of the danger. She impressed me with the fact that if I hardened my
heart the spirit would cease to strive with me. The time came when God
abandoned the willful sinner and left him to his fate. I went around
with this red-hot coal of fire on my spiritual back for a long time.
I acquired habits of thought then that worked havoc with my peace
for half a lifetime. I have never entirely escaped the fear that I
may turn out to be an apostate after all. It seizes upon me like a
malady. I am troubled by the realization that the spirit does not seem
to strive with me as it did when I was younger. This is a fearfully
lonely feeling, and not rational. But sanity, in my opinion, is an
achievement. I have seen very few well-balanced people in my life who
were not dunces.

I was finally soundly converted and joined the church. At the time
that experience seemed more miraculous than it does now; I have been
born again so many times since. First I had to adjust myself to the
heavenly mind. Then I must adjust myself to the ministry of my husband.
Finally, after his death, I had to be born again to the world, capable
of dealing with it sensibly and honorably. My experience is that this
last requires more divine inspiration than being a private Christian
protected by all the defenses that marriage and religion raise about a
woman’s life.




XVII

THE WORKING OF LOVE


When I was nine years old I remember a certain thing that happened. I
was sitting somewhere behind the old field schoolhouse with three other
little girls. We were making wishes and telling our fortunes by pulling
the petals from daisies. I made a wish and tried it out by the daisy
petals. But I would not tell what it was.

‘I know,’ said one little girl.

‘You never could guess,’ I retorted.

She bent over and whispered, ‘You wished for a husband!’

It turned out that we had all wished for husbands. We were the
simplest, most innocent of little creatures, at the doll-mothering,
playhouse stage of development, totally ignorant of love and lovers.
But we felt the need of husbands, as, I suppose, the Eastern Hemisphere
might have longed for the Western Hemisphere to make the world
complete. We felt incomplete.

The florescence of nature came to me as it does to all youth,
unbeknowingly. What I remember about that is the quantities of romantic
poetry I consumed, practicing at the same time a very strong virginal
antagonism toward young men.

At last love and the lover did come to me. I have written all the
experience out in another place, and of my marriage at the age of
seventeen.

Love does something to the mind. But it is something that you cannot
use so long as it lasts as a vital part of your experience. During the
first ten years of my married life it seemed to close the intellectual
pores of my mind. I lived according to that definition of faith which
says it is ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things
not seen.’ I passed through many joys, poverty, fear, and great
tribulations according to that ritual of one sentence. I did not think
in the terms of ideas, but only in the terms of love. I was guided
entirely by my husband’s mind, which was one you may say literally
stricken by the Holy Spirit. He was a preacher and made only one use of
his mind, that of finding God and teaching sinners the way of salvation.

This was not as you may suppose a drab and monotonous existence, but
one filled with strange and lofty experiences.

I was destined to discover that mother’s ideas of religion were coldly
platonic as compared with the passionate fervor of my circuit rider in
his devotion to God. Mother believed in behaving yourself and keeping
the Commandments and walking according to the ordinances of the church
to which she belonged. He believed in literally living the life of
Jesus Christ--and could not do it. This brought on the struggle that
lasted for him more than twenty years. I tried to keep up with him. The
first time he fasted and prayed all day after we were married, I fasted
also, but could not pray that long. Protracted prayers are a mystery
to me. I can simply fall upon my knees and let that be a prayer any
time. What is the good of words to God? They are symbols we use to one
another because we neither know nor are known to one another as He
knows us.

This was the last time I ever fasted, because at the end of the day I
was exhausted, nervous and in no Christian mood.

I cannot tell in years how long it took me to do it, but I finally
adjusted myself about my husband like a small protesting world and so
stood the siege. Love held us as close together as if we had one heart
in common. But I do not remember that we ever had the same mind about
anything. The point at last with me was to get mine disentangled from
the bondage of his brave, beautiful, but impractical religious beliefs.
I never succeeded. All these years after his death I am still more
conscious of the truth that led him than of my own right mind. I am
still beholden to his God; I have never got round to serving my own God
with a free mind and a comfortable, cheerful spirit. I must fall into a
state of anguish once in so often, make sacrifices that do not ease the
pain, and go about wondering where the witness of my spirit is. I have
the feeling sometimes that at last I may be dragged through the gates
of heaven, spent, woeful, and humble, by the very power of his spirit;
that I shall not stride in with my hat on and my head up, bearing a
good conscience with me in token of a well-spent life.

If you have been born in the twentieth century and have a good deal
of human dust sticking to your soul, if you really love the world,
remembering that God made it and blessed it, as others think they love
only Heaven; if you like human beings, good and bad, better than you do
saints--it is a queer feeling to know that you are forever involved in
a mediæval religion of asceticism, sacrifice, and sufferings.

By this time it is my very nature to work up hardships and great
spiritual struggles for myself which only involve me deeper and higher
in the will of my husband’s God--all the time remembering the child I
used to be, so sure of a kinder God, so peacefully at home beneath His
kind heavens. It is a queer situation which will end very creditably, I
suppose, with my funeral.




XVIII

VENTURES IN SCRIPTURES


I was eleven years younger than my husband, being really in the
plastic period of adolescence. He was the gentlest of men, but he
had a brilliant and mature mind, a queer temple of intellectual
loveliness with pure classical lines. He did his thinking as a master
architect does his drawing, with delicacy and precision. He was never
overbearing, but the elegance, sweetness, and sincerity of his mind
confounded my younger wits. I supposed that a man who could think like
that must be correct in his conclusions, and for something like ten
years I surrendered my own mind and left him to do our thinking. Most
of it was pious, but always informed with that effulgence of the spirit
peculiar to the rarer saints. My impression now is that I became a
very good young person, by ear, so to speak, and that I was strangely
stupid. The mental background I had acquired from much ravenous
reading before my marriage faded. I forgot Tasso’s great poetry and
settled down on the hillside of a mountain circuit with Lundy and
the beatitudes. Maybe this was good for me spiritually, but it was
diminishing mentally, which, in my opinion, was never meant to be the
effect of any Scriptures upon the mind.

Lundy was not a practical man spiritually. I remember distinctly how
determined he was to remain poor in spirit that he might become one
of those legitimate heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven. I imitated his
poverty here with the same artless sincerity a child imitates an older
person, though I could never put much feeling into the idea of being
poor in spirit. The effect upon him was that with his nature elegant to
the point of fastidiousness, and his scholarly mind, he walked humbly
hand in hand with the meanest of his flock, making himself literally
one of the least of them.

It was all wrong. I call your attention to the fact that Jesus went up
into a mountain and set Him above the multitude before He began that
great Sermon on the Mount. And when He finished it and came down the
great multitude followed Him. I do not suppose He was jostled by that
crowd. He was apart and far beyond them, and so held Himself there and
everywhere else. It will not do to be intimately poor in spirit with
people who have no sense of your meaning. If you do they will keep you
poorer than the Scriptures require both in spirit and fact.

Lundy was the same way about that beatitude which recommends those
that mourn for they shall be comforted. We were rich in love and peace
and were being as good as it is possible for human beings to live,
but he would mourn in spite of everything for his transgressions, any
transgression he could remember. He was the most unforgiving man of
himself I ever knew.

In this connection I remember the first theological ruction we had
after our marriage. He had harked up one of his former sins and was
making himself miserable about it. I tried every way to smooth over
his transgression--in vain. Finally I lost patience and called his
attention to the generous forgiving Gospel he preached to other
sinners. Did he believe he preached the truth? Certainly he did, was
his reply.

‘Well then,’ I retorted, ‘why should you malign the goodness of God by
imagining you yourself are not forgiven according to the same Gospel?’

This was one of the many clinches we had over these beatitudes. He said
that a man’s conscience must be his guide in such matters. He reserved
the right to repent of his own sins! He went on to imply that I might
be morally obtuse. This was the straw that broke my camel’s back. I
retorted that I was tired, and I supposed the Lord was tired of the
vain repetition of his repentance over some little dead and forgotten
transgression. I thought such conduct was morally debilitating. From
this we had hot words and I flung myself upon the bed and wept bitterly.

My belief is that I had some glimmerings even as far back as that
of the true meaning of these particular Scriptures. I know now that
they are emergency remedies for the soul and not designed to create a
perpetual state of mind. The effort to practice them all the time will
victimize any man in his relations to his fellow men. I feel better
most of the time, but now and then I have known what it is to be poor
in spirit before the Lord on the occasion of some defalcation in virtue
or patience or courage; but it is not my idea to tell any one else
about it. I do my mourning and hurry on as quickly as possible to
the more cheerful part of this beatitude which says ‘for they shall
be comforted,’ feeling that I do myself credit by taking the Lord at
His word as soon as possible. I have practiced swiftness in acts of
faith and found it profitable. If the Bible means anything at all,
you have a right to believe it. That is the test of the truth of the
Scriptures--believe them, and if they do not come true you have the
right to deny them. I have never had the chance to deny a single one,
though of course I have lacked the spiritual capacity to try out the
whole thing.

But there is that one which says, ‘Blessed are the meek’--meaning
teachable--‘for they shall inherit the earth.’ It is not my nature to
be teachable, but I have been in such tight quarters all my life that
I have been obliged to learn a great deal with meekness. And it is a
fact, I have inherited more of the earth than I deserve. To be strictly
honest, I have never hungered and thirsted after righteousness to the
point of egotism characteristic of some saints. I always had a feeling
of modest limitations along this line; but now that I think back to
those first years of my married life, it seems to be anguishing and
pitiful the way I strove to be good. It was so terribly necessary if I
was to keep up with Lundy.

The motive was a trifle crooked, as you will see; but the Lord honored
it as He did that woman’s faith who had the issue of blood, which was
an unintelligent faith. For as I look back now it seems to me that I
was pretty well filled with righteousness then according to the other
end of that beatitude. With me, being merciful is not a virtue. It
comes too easy for me to have deserved much in return, like some kind
of happy weakness of character. Still, I have finally been overwhelmed
with mercies. I feel sometimes that I might have used them to a better
advantage further back in the years when my needs were very great. But
the point I make is that this Scripture was fulfilled. I have even been
pure enough in heart at rare intervals to see God. But not often when
I was up and shining. Usually it would be when I was passing through
some valley of the shadow of great grief. After the pain is over I
have always been able to look back and know that sorrows are much more
purifying and elevating to the mind than joys.

But when it comes to that verse which says ‘Blessed are the
peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God,’ it has
depended upon the circumstances whether I came out of the scrimmage
like such a child. I have known myself to forgo the blessing and refuse
to make a peace that left me in the lurch. In that case I hunted up
some such Scripture as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and
took what satisfaction I could get from that. Never yet have I parted
with an eye or a tooth, or turned the other cheek except to my Lord,
who is the only one who has the right to smite me.

These, of course, are my favorable experiences with the truth of the
Bible. I have suffered a-plenty from the unfavorable passages, such as,
‘Judge not.... For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.’
I have had this experience a thousand times. Some one who knows me,
or a stranger of whom I have never heard, rises up and passes judgment
upon me as if it was a harsh and sacred duty he performed--without
ever suspecting, I suppose, that he is measuring to me again unfair
and superficial criticisms I have passed on other people. They do have
somewhat the advantage in this business, because there are so many more
of them than there is of me, and one person cannot spare the time to
pass as many adverse judgments as one author endures. Even at that, I
fare very well on account of getting so many more favorable judgments
than I deserve from the same sources.

I was so much involved in the purely spiritual struggle of trying to
live above and without the world until I was thirty years old that I
became a sort of ignoramus. I cannot now recall what were the social
and intellectual conditions of this period. I remember who the great
preachers were, but not the name of a single statesman or public
servant except one old congressman who used to do his electioneering at
Sunday-school picnics. Readers of the circuit-rider stories must have
observed that these are records in religious living to the exclusion of
all earthly interests.

I suppose this is the reason why even ‘My Book and Heart’ produces
the impression upon some readers of being the chronicle of a narrow
and dreary life. I do not think it is, you understand. It seems to me
that almost any person with a provincial mind might fail to appreciate
the literature of a foreign country with which they were totally
unfamiliar. The spiritual world which I inhabited at that time is
not known now by a great many people otherwise very well informed.
They are unable therefore to appreciate the vividness and romance of
such an existence. It seems drab to them because they live in sums and
dividends and secular realities and the same kind of diversions, not in
sublime illusions.

But try chasing an impractical saint up one Jacob’s ladder after
another for twelve years and find out for yourself what a varied and
stimulating experience it is. Hunting big game in a jungle is nothing
to the risks you take and the rarefied hardships you endure and the
keen relief you feel now and then between adventures. I cannot claim
that it was mentally exhilarating, but I developed considerable wing
power of the spirit very helpful to me when I finally did go back, pick
up my mind, shake some of the star dust off, and begin to use it with a
good conscience for my own benefit in this present world.

But never so long as I live can I escape the tragic effects upon my
life of these early years. My mind is free now, and I can reason as
clearly as the next one about what a dear and blessed gift from God
the world has been to me; but in my heart I seem still to belong back
there in the years upon the lower rungs of that ever-upward-stretching
ladder I used to climb toward Lundy’s God. I cannot get over feeling
hard pressed spiritually sometimes, as if I was in dangerous need of
chastening--I suppose the steel bridge never forgets the furnace in
which its girders were melted and forged; I would give anything now
and then to rest from this smelting sense of God and be comfortable in
my carnal mind, but I never can be.




XIX

THE WISDOM OF THE WORD


What I have tried to prove is this: The Word of God is a prophecy of
us in all of our manifestations and it records the laws of life and
conduct from which no man can escape. Whether he is a good one or a
bad one, he will find his portrait drawn there and a complete prophecy
of what his fate will be. It never fails; it always comes true, for
the atheist, agnostic, or spiritualistic sorcerer no less than for the
saint.

Just look yourself up in that Book, and if you know how, you will
find yourself predicted and recorded in it down to the very nose of
your nature. Set down a list of your virtues and look up the rewards
promised in return for these virtues, and you will know for certain
what your dividends in living will be if you hold onto your assets.
Make a list of your vices and weaknesses. Then, if you have the
courage, look up the consequences which follow them as recorded in this
Book and you will know long before judgment day what will happen to you
even in this present world. ‘He that liveth by the sword shall perish
by the sword.’

Even if one does not feel the keen edge of the blade in his breast, he
is cut down one way or the other, and knows it whether any one else
suspects it or not. He may be a rich man and a philanthropist, and
he may get a great send-off, with a splendid funeral and a mausoleum
set over his grave; but if his fortune was built upon widows’ mites
and the bread taken from the poor, if he swindled and cheated, if he
practiced usury, he went down to his dust a very poor man and knows it.
Because the Word is written in him and only copied in the Bible.

The Baptists are not so far wrong about their notions of predestination
and election, though far be it from me to travel my days encompassed
about by their doctrines. That would be too nerve-racking to the mortal
mind. Give me a creed with more elbow room in it for my transient
transgressions and more encouragement for believing I have a chance to
save my own soul by growing my own virtues according to the Word, which
I could not have if I got the notion that I was damned or elected from
the foundation of the world.

The place where the makers of these sterner creeds miss their cue, in
my opinion, is when they fail to realize that the Scriptures are a sort
of key to which we may refer and find the answer to the equation we
are. They contain the history of all dead men and the prophecies of all
living men and men to come. The smallest little squinched-up fraction
of a saint can look in that Book and find out exactly what he is equal
to and even how to become the whole unit of one. But we turn the trick.
We do make ourselves according to the mind we use in the business. I
do not know any more terrifyingly liberal provision made by Providence
in our behalf. I have often wondered why the preachers do not say more
about it, for it is far more convincing than the damnation gospel with
which they used to set us afire.

I had no such wisdom of the Word as this, however, in the days of
which I am now writing. I was a sort of Protestant Catholic, if you
know what I mean. I accepted Lundy’s interpretations of the Gospels as
a devout Catholic gets his from the priest. And I was not very much
worried about not being able to live up to his ideals in the Christian
life. Who has ever kept pace with the piety of a good priest? I did
not feel obliged to do so. I existed in a state of mental obedience
to certain religious convictions which were not my own. This was bad
for me mentally and morally. I had considerable natural ability, but I
remember distinctly being afraid to cut loose and think thoughts kin
to my kind of mind lest I should sin against my husband’s faith. The
virtues that one gets under such conditions do not really belong to
her, but to the church or priest who imposes them. You are trained to
them as a leopard is trained to jump through fiery hoops in a circus
without singeing his tail. Without suspecting such a thing, I was that
artificial in my Christian life during this period, a pathetically
accomplished trick saint.

I have sometimes wondered if the stampede of human souls from the
tyranny of creeds accounts for the strange mental and moral disorders
of our times, and that presently, being as we are, forever immortal
and close kin to God, we shall discover righteousness for ourselves
and choose goodness as the great vocation of man, as it surely is.
One thing is certain--in every age when the people have not been
permitted to study the Scriptures, but have been obliged to accept
a church’s interpretation of the Word, there followed a period of
animal simplicity of mind in the masses, ignorance, loss of ambition,
initiative, and all the poverty, follies, and meanness of mind which
issue from such conditions.

Without every kind of liberty, men must perish, and they do. The
only knowledge that really counts in character is the knowledge we
get for ourselves tested by experience. This is the reason why some
very cultured people remain so ignorant and ineffective. The only law
that ever will actually control men is the will to obey their own
conscience. Therefore the primary object of every preacher and teacher
should be to set up the ideal of courage and an honest mind. Such
people are safe citizens in this world and the next one. But they are
not safe under doctrines, creeds, and laws arbitrarily imposed, whether
they get them from the Bible or the Bolsheviks.

Consider the condition of our own country now. The democratic form of
government is the best form for patriots. We were patriots when we
signed the Declaration of Independence. Now we are not in principle or
conduct. We are getting a commercialized conscience and covering the
snare of it with philanthropy. So it turns out that the Constitution we
made back there in the days when we were plain Christian patriots does
not control the mind or illustrate the character of this nation now.

A monarchal form of government would be no better. Mankind seems to be
outgrowing kings, not by growing better but less good. We are turning
our back upon conscience and the Ten Commandments. No system of laws
will govern such a people. I do not know what the political economists
think of this situation, but as an old woman who looks at it through
the passages of many Scriptures, I see the shadows of terrible events
lengthening across the world. It is coming, that fearful punishment men
inflict upon men for their sins. It is coming because it is not in us
to endure too long our own unrighteousness. This is the law of moral
economy written in us which we cannot escape.

The big knot in this whole problem is human nature. But once in so
often we do untie it and straighten things out, not so much by the
grace of God, but by the perverted righteousness of ferocity. Then we
react and turn out once more to be the children of God--not lost after
all, only chastened.

The secret of all things is as far from us as the East is from the West
and as His ways are from our ways. Therefore, the higher standard we
reach in pure romance the nearer we are to truth. I prefer Milton’s
poetry, the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, my choice of the Psalms,
and a few of the elder hymns to anything Mr. H. G. Wells can think or
write about the beginnings of life or the history of Christianity. It
is interesting copy and contains much entrancing information, but Mr.
Wells has too much sense and too little faith in the right direction
to be the medium of the Lord’s divine illusion, which clothes us like
a garment and is the only protection we have against the destructive
rationalism of the mortal mind.

We have daily examples now of an educational system which encourages
license in thinking along these lines. Two youths who graduated with
distinction from two leading universities developed such unscrupulous
intellects that they planned a monstrous crime. They had an ambition
to commit a ‘perfect crime,’ as formerly Christian education inspired
men to achieve honor. They executed a murder and proceeded with their
plans for blackmail, ransom, and the scientific torture of their
victims. They were not originally perverts. Now they must be regarded
as criminally insane. They are the products of the rational system in
education and of the ever-increasing intellectual slums produced by the
license of this system.

I think Mr. William Jennings Bryan has the wrong bull by the horns
when he assails the theory of evolution. It is not a theory, but a
fact distinctly recorded in Genesis and proved by the whole history of
creation down to the present time. But he might become a benefactor of
youth if he would exercise the same energy in getting an interstate
alienist commission appointed to test the moral sanity of many learned
professors in our schools and universities. The findings of such a
commission would go far toward revealing the sources of the wave of
criminal insanity that is showing its crest in every court in this
country. Too many learned doctors without any faith in the law which
God is, are teaching young people how to think. They become criminals
mentally whether they ever commit a crime or not.




XX

CONFESSION AND THE CHURCH


But what about the Church in all this moral confusion? More and more
active, more and more prosperous, without having much effect upon the
situation! What has become of that note of authority with which it
formerly controlled in so great a measure the conduct of men? Well, it
turns out to be a sort of spiritual bluff the Church put up, now no
longer effective because men have learned how to think.

This is a dangerous discovery in view of the fact that we do not know
enough or fear enough to think righteously. But less than at any time
for the last two thousand years are we listening to the voice of the
preachers. It is they who have their ear to the ground listening to the
rumbling demands of the world. They are cats fighting over modernism.

I do not know what a modernist is, but my impression is that it is an
element in the ministry of some churches anxious to accommodate its
members and keep them cordial by yielding to their demands for less
piety and more diversion. One pastor has introduced the ‘sacred dance’
about his church altar and quotes David’s example as his justification.
David was a great singer, but not a good man. This preacher might take
another man’s wife as David took Uriah’s and be quite as plausible in
his contention.

The Methodist Church has just lifted the ban on worldly amusements
for its members. And we are just now getting the news of a fine old
bishop about to be tried for heresy who strode into the court of
bishops accompanied by his radical lawyer. He looks as queer and out of
drawing as Socrates must have appeared going off with that young rascal
Alcibiades to make a night of it!

What I mean is that the Church is losing its dignity and authority as
a holy institution. The debacle was inevitable, because its oppressive
methods over the minds and imaginations of men were at variance with
the wisdom of God. His Word was split into doctrines and creeds. No one
denomination of us could use the whole of it. The plan of salvation
varied according to the Church to which you belonged, and the doctrines
by which we were to be damned varied even more. A good deal was taught
concerning deliverance from sin, and nothing much was proved concerning
freedom in Christ, which is the whole thing.

Jesus was of all men the mildest and tenderest in his relation to men,
but the prelates, dignitaries, and princes of all the churches with
which I am familiar have been overbearing either in their own personal
character or in their interpretation of the will of God. This was their
method during the Church’s period of power to frighten men into the
Kingdom of Heaven, as now during its decline we find the disposition to
coax people into the Church by offering indulgences.

There is no warrant in the Scriptures for such practices. They
contain the laws of righteousness, the rules of living set down plain
enough for a wayfaring man to understand. We are left free to enjoy
the rewards of our virtues and to suffer the consequences of our
transgression. The rest is silence. This is where the Church made its
mistake--too much preaching and terrorizing, not enough teaching of
just the Word. Now we have the reaction.




XXI

LUNDY AND I WALK AND TALK


It is queer how thoughts you had long ago and the very scene of these
thoughts come back to you after you have lived a dozen later lives.
I recall something now that indicates how narrow the margin was then
between me and one of the threadbare fallacies of my sex:

Lundy and I were walking late in the afternoon through the college
campus. I remember the deepening twilight beneath the trees. I wore a
dark dress. I was young, slender, pale, homely--what I mean is that
I remember feeling this way, sad and put upon. Lundy was stepping
along innocently beside me, gracefully silent, no doubt enjoying this
silence, for he was one who never practiced speech as a relief for
intellectual hysteria. He could retain his thoughts like a gentleman.
Suddenly I let out what I was thinking about the world’s injustice to
women. We were the victims of the whole social and domestic order of
mankind. We were the bond servants of a civilization which we had no
part in making. We had no rights, only duties to perform, and so on and
so forth. I cannot think now how I came by such thoughts. I must have
read something along this line, and, like D---- was suffering from,
mental regurgitation.

What brought me to my own personal senses was the look Lundy gave me,
not reproachful, but startled, as if he had received a thrust and
wondered if he deserved it.

We walked on, staring straight ahead; but I could feel my husband
searching himself, looking for his sins against me, and his harshness.
This was unendurable. I sat down beside the road and made haste to
renege. All at once it was clear how good this man had been to me, how
hard he worked that I might be a little more comfortable, how patient
he was with my ruffian mind, and how he had given me all the love he
could spare from his jealous God. And now--appalling thought--what if
he went off on one of his remorseful tangents, his ever uncertain peace
destroyed by my complaint?

Never did a woman praise her husband more fervently than I did for
the next few minutes. I laughed and stroked his legs. He would not
sit down! He had the rigid air of a man who preferred to take his
punishment standing up. I vowed I was only teasing him. As a matter of
fact, I was not thinking of my own husband at all when I began to drool
about the wrongs of women. I must have been seeking martyrdom at large.

This was one of those little epochs we make in living. I passed as
quick as a flash through an enlightening mental process. From that
moment I escaped the idea of grievances from which many women suffer
too much in their imaginations. I have been a sluggard ever since about
correcting the abuses from which women suffer. I have never been able
to cast myself or my pen whole-heartedly into a campaign to clean up
the men and bring them to repentance for their trespasses against us.
Let somebody else do it! Because, of course, it must be done before
we repent of the wrongs we practice against them, such as headaches,
indifference, inefficiency, and extravagance. Upon those occasions
when I have been even slightly moved to do my duty toward chastening
them, I always think of Lundy, the astonished blue look he gave me that
time on the campus in Oxford, as if this was the first he knew of his
unkindness and injustice to the woman rib in his side. I remember him,
the whole mind the man of him had at that moment, and I cannot believe
in the light of his kind heart that men really mean to be unfair to
women, any more than we mean to be as exasperating as we are to them
sometimes.

We are both the victims of some secret plan of Nature in this business.
Men are overbearing on account of the kind of gender they are, and
women have nervous squalls on account of the kind of gender they are.
If they were entirely compatible, the one to the other, their children
might be poor, spiritless creatures. For love certainly is a fearfully
eager, exacting, and destructive influence upon the dead level of
peace. Therefore incompatibility never seemed to me reasonable grounds
for divorce. On the contrary, it must be in Nature the best of all
genealogical grounds for those two afflicted people to continue to live
together.

The success of marriage does not depend upon how well it is financed
with money or social position, but almost entirely upon how much love
and wit you can put into it. Maybe there is some grave inequality
of mind or spirit or quality between you in the beginning, but go on
living together and presently there will be six of one and half a dozen
of the other. You will develop practically the same horse power of
perversity, even if the man becomes ferociously impatient and the wife
sinks away into cowardly patience.

There is nothing known to man as exasperating as an infernally patient
woman. She is either mean or lacking in wit. She never seems to realize
that domestic temper in a man is a form of hysteria and should be
treated accordingly with a dash of cold water, figuratively speaking,
or some sort of shock, which is not meant to be a suggestion of license
in conduct. He would ask no better excuse for a tantrum or a tyranny
than for his wife to commit a fault. But there are a thousand ways of
twisting the tail of a perverse man’s temper without ceasing to be an
artless lady. All you have to do is to put your mind on it. The Lord
has endowed every woman with special talents for this emergency.

I know one charming little gentlewoman who married a very ordinary man
who never had the opportunity to control anything or anybody until he
achieved this lovely wife. Then he set in to exercise his powers along
this line. If he had been the warden of a penitentiary he could not
have been more exacting than he was as the master of his own house and
the husband of this woman. The marvel was the sweet way she went on
showing her admiration and affection for him. Some of us were disposed
to pity her as a poor creature without spirit. Then I caught on to her
game.

When her husband was present she never ceased to augment him by telling
what he would permit her to do, or more particularly what he would
not allow her to do, say or think. Each revelation was, of course,
accompanied by an exchange of eye-flashing intelligence between those
present and frequently by an embarrassed flush on the husband’s face.
Nothing could stop her from making these revelations of his meanness
and tyranny, always as if she approved of him to the point of boasting.
We heard that when he reprimanded her for exposing his private
authority she remained artless and too simple to be managed.

‘But you know, dear, you did say I should not go to that meeting, and
I wanted them to understand why I would not accept their invitation,’
and so on and so forth. In the course of two years she let in the light
of so much public opinion on this man and his methods as an overbearing
husband that now he practically runs to open the door to her every
wish. He is tremendously concerned that his neighbors shall know his
wife may do as she almighty pleases. And so she does. It was one of the
most diverting and enlightening dramas of married life I have seen in
years, played without a single mis-said line, and ended, you may say,
with much secret applause.

If it appears that I have turned my light too far forward through the
years in the immediately preceding pages, I can only say that we must
follow the beam while it shines when one is trailing the mind, even if
it is your own mind. This was as good a place as any to set down the
effects of that first and last interview with my husband concerning
the grievances of women. The reader will recognize it as the veracious
record of a strictly feminine mind whatever else he may think.

If I may be permitted to comment upon my own copy in thinking, I should
say that once a woman’s mind is divorced from her affections it is
a trifle unbalanced and untrustworthy no matter how brilliantly and
broadly she uses it. It ricochets like a ball fired at a low angle of
elevation which is apt to fall back upon her own destiny disastrously.
A good many of these duds are already dropping behind the Nineteenth
Amendment. I cannot see much improvement in the character of women,
though they are more alert mentally and less satisfied. They have
gained something they wanted and they have lost something they needed
personally and privately. I have felt obliged for conscience’ sake to
believe in equal rights for women, but the best success I ever had
along this line has been to go out and win by my own works and wits the
rights I preferred and that would be the most becoming to me in the end.




XXII

WE CONSIDER GREEK CULTURE


My husband was not only a distinguished scholar and a great preacher
but he had a brilliant, gallant mind of his own. Let him have it, and
God be thanked, was my attitude. Whenever he flared intellectually, I
turned out my light and watched with admiration such an aurora borealis
of fine, cold, clear thinking as I have never seen in any book or
heard from another man. Some radiance of his mind will remain upon the
horizon of mine as long as I live. I can never tell how much of it has
brightened the edges of the copy I have produced since those days. For
I have been a cheerful plagiarist of light whenever I found it.

But if we came to loggerheads in an argument, as frequently happened,
on any subject, whether it was religion, philosophy, poetry, or the
fatalistic mind of the ancient Greeks, I stepped out with gaffs on
the legs of my native wit and met him as an unscrupulous wrestler
meets an honest big man. I had all the advantages, because I was never
constrained in the exercise of my mind by much real knowledge of the
subject or by those precedents which govern a scrupulously trained
intellect. I left him to furnish the information. My business was to
digest it quick as a flash and use it, then to prove my contention or
to reject it for the same reason. I do not know what a casuist is, but
he frequently accused me of being one, as if this was a fault of which
I should be ashamed. But I never was. This grieved him. I am sure he
felt that I would not overcome a certain vulgar insolence of ignorance,
because I had no native reverence for learning.

Once when I was belaying the ancient Greeks like a ruffian he assumed
the dignified manner of a gentleman and a scholar who must be patient
with a Smart Aleck. As near as I can recall, this is the gist of that
altercation:

‘You do yourself discredit when you speak disparagingly of an
illustrious people,’ he said.

I knew nothing of their civilization, art, or literature. Then he
went on to pay a tribute to the Greek intellect. It was symmetrical,
dignified, and beautiful as their architecture. Had I ever studied
the glory and simplicity of the Parthenon? I admitted that I had not,
but I was willing to concede that they had highly developed artistic
instincts. Which, I had to infer, was the wrong phrase to use.

‘They had brains, brains!’ he retorted hotly.

‘I would no more revere a man for his brains than for the hair on his
head,’ I shot back; ‘the quality and quantity of both are determined
by purely physical conditions, the climate, the food they eat, their
habits as human beings. I judge the Greeks by what they have produced.’

‘That is precisely what you cannot do intelligently, because you do not
know what they produced.’

‘Yes, I know the effects--’

‘You are profoundly ignorant of the effects of Greek culture upon the
world,’ he interrupted.

‘Culture’ was one of Lundy’s words, never a favorite with me. I am not
denying there is such a thing, but whether it is beneficent depends in
my opinion upon the moderation with which you absorb it and balance it
with better, sturdier elements of character, like honest bigotry and
hard-headed convictions. It is a boastful word with a bad reputation in
advanced stages of civilization. It too frequently became the elegance
by which the distance between morality and immorality is shortened.

Lundy, however, loved it, with no such barbaric instincts as I had to
warn him against it. And I suffered much from the personal uses he made
of it during what may be called the Hellenic period of our married life.

This time I made a clean sweep and cut Greek culture to the bone.

‘There was something wrong with their culture,’ I returned, ‘because
they did not survive it as a nation. Men are destroyed by their own
minds, their systems of thought. What the ancient Greeks produced with
all their art and learning and culture are these modern Greeks. I do
not think much of them. Neither do you. They have the same hair, the
same brains. They are out of the same stock, but virtue has gone out of
them. They are no longer sculptors and philosophers. Nobody quotes them
or imitates them. The fatalistic mind back of all their culture made
slaves and little men of their descendants.’

Lundy regarded me for a moment in regretful silence, as we sometimes
measure some one who is dear to us who is determined not to be like us.

‘Corra,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you have an underhanded mind. You
deliberately missed my point.’

‘I made my own point, which was better than being run through by
yours,’ I laughed.

Then I had to listen to his explanation of how there were now no Greeks
of that breed. The Persians had destroyed that great race.

His scholarly indignation frequently rose to the pitch of sarcasm. But
I was never abashed. I could not be made to hang my head mentally or
to feel what is now called the inferiority complex. If you can finance
the outrageous courage of ignorance with a certain secret wisdom of
your own, you stand a very good chance of disconcerting a learned man
in an argument. I always came out of these intellectual scrimmages
exhilarated like a ragged young sparrow that has enjoyed an upward
flight upon an eagle’s wings.

One little trait I venture to record by way of illustrating how
shrewd a woman’s mind can be at ducking out of sight at the right
moment. Lundy was resentful like most learned men--or unlearned for
that matter--if it appeared that I was about to get the better of the
contention. He felt the trickery of wit at his expense, a petticoated
Puck putting Bottom’s head on a wise man’s shoulders. Intellectual
rage caused him to blink. Whenever he regarded me with this fluttering
blue gaze I cast the argument aside, rushed to him, laid my head upon
his knees as these knees were the executioner’s block and invited him
to strike in case he desired to make such a disposition of a fool. In
such a manner I was always able to restore the equilibrium of love and
charity between us without his ever suspecting that this was balm I
laid upon his wounded vanity.

I have now a certain misty tinge of time in the colors of my mind,
elegant wisps of culture, pseudo evidences of learning obtained from
my association with Lundy. I have practically no accurate information
on any subject, which is one reason I so rarely burden the reader with
a quotation; but I have the sense and feeling of all these things
Lundy studied in his lifetime to learn. I walked for years in the rich
pastures of his mind.




XXIII

THE YEAR IN OXFORD


As the years passed there were happier periods, all of which have been
recorded in ‘My Book and Heart.’ The years in Oxford, for example.

More than one circumstance contributed to the relaxation I enjoyed
there. The prim academic life of the little college town was
stimulating and refreshing to me after the hard and lean years in the
itineracy. We were relieved from the burden of souls, and Lundy was
absorbed in his work as teacher of Greek in the college. This is the
one interest he had that I could not share. I had worried and prayed
with him through all the Gospels, but when it came to feeling my way
through the enclitics and iota subscripts of a dead cross-stitch
language I had no conscience about leaving him to his fate.

Now that I look back, this is a queer circumstance, that I never had
the least ambition to keep pace with my husband mentally. I was not
uneasy lest he should escape me by this route, as I always felt he
might do in those frightfully arduous pilgrimages he made toward God
in the spirit. Anything might happen to such a traveler, I feared.
But I have always enjoyed the assurance of having a very dexterous
mind, regardless of whether I had as much information or intellectual
training as the other person had or not.

This is no more a conceit than a man feels in the strength of his
muscles. He is not disposed to skin the cat in order to prove his
physical power. He is much more apt to sit down comfortably observant
while some weaker man boasts of his biceps. I have done a lot of that
kind of sitting down in my life. Nothing fans me into such a state of
peaceful mental somnambulance as the intellectual antics of a person
who displays his learning, not from vanity always, but frequently
because it is all he has got; no real sense, no wisdom of his own,
merely much good stuff he has learned from other sources. He spreads it
like a garment as any other decent person would to hide the thinness of
his shanks.

The literary life of Oxford was the most youthful and strident feature
of this old college town. I do not know how the dean of the English
department contrived to mislead so many young men, but year after year
a certain per cent of the senior class were imbued with the idea that
they had some kind of gift for literary creation or literary criticism.
The latter predominated. During the winter months they shook the very
battlements of English literature. They spared nobody from Henry
Fielding to Dickens. Never shall I forget the way the feathers of the
Brontë sisters used to fly when half a dozen of these young whelps
seized upon ‘Jane Eyre.’ I was in my George Eliot stage at the time and
suffered a graver mind, but I recall with no flattery to myself the
part I took in these discussions. There may be such a thing as a mature
mind under the age of forty, but if so it is the result of premature
gray matter. I was still in the adolescent period mentally and found
great refreshment in the group of young-rooster intellectuals who
frequently came to the house. We worked out our theories and opinions
on one another as growing children wrestle.

Oxford was a narrow-minded little community, but it was pigeon-breasted
morally. The only disciple of Zola in the town was an innocent young
man from Arkansas, who had been well grounded in his morals. He was
by way of becoming a novelist at that time, but turned out to be a
historian. He graduated in vain from the English departments of five
universities and was finally reduced to recording facts and dates and
rewriting information that he could not digest. It was a form of mental
regurgitation. A great many people have it. The one rash thing he ever
did was to espouse the cause of realism in fiction, which none of us
knew or cared enough to attack. He came in frequently to discuss the
subject with me, chiefly, I suppose, because no one else would listen
to him.

I have always been interested in bores. They are in my opinion the
strangest of human phenomena, probably the one type of character
impossible to dramatize. Has any one ever read a novel entitled ‘The
Bore’? You have not, because the creative mind cannot produce him.
He is automatic mentally. He can learn, frequently more than an
intelligent man, but he cannot think. He is without imagination and the
personal messengers of sensibility. He never knows or suspects how the
other fellow feels. Poor D---- could talk indefinitely in a sensible
monotone without the glint of a thought to brighten his durable
conversation. To me it has ever been fascinating to watch a good brain
work that was totally disconnected from life, charm, or personality.

Everything was settled except the relative merits of the new school of
realism in fiction as compared to the old school of romanticism. This
was a burning question then. As I remember, Émile Zola was the father
of the realists. He had written a particularly disgusting novel, the
title of which I do not recall; but one scene in it I am compelled
against my will to remember--which, I suppose, proves that Zola was
indeed a realist, because I have forgotten ten thousand lines of poetry
that entranced me more.

This was a description of the decomposed body of a soldier plowed
up on a battlefield after the Franco-Prussian War. Zola omitted not
one worm from this picture. Yorick’s skull was a clean white bone as
compared with this horrible pollution of what had been a man. He made
realism stink for five pages. I shall never be willing to confound
this monstrous insensate vitalizing of the processes of death with the
convincing romanticism of life, which is what the best literature is.
However, my opinion is prejudiced in this matter, for I am an incurable
romanticist, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last breath I
draw. I think the world of life is one bright illusion conferred upon
us by a good God, and that if it becomes anything else, that also is an
illusion by which we damn ourselves.

I have a vague recollection of Cæsar or some such person having said
that the Romans were made indolent and effeminate by the importation
of luxuries from the provinces--a free translation, but the gist of
what he meant. I cannot tell what might have happened to me if we had
gone on living in Oxford and if Lundy had continued to hold the chair
of Greek in Emory College. We were as poor as possible, but I had my
little luxuries from the various provinces of literature. Every college
community titters with quotations from the best writers and speakers. I
was subject during this period to short-flighted aspirations, such, for
example, as trying to understand prosody. But I could make nothing of
this science of poetry, not even with Lundy’s illuminating assistance.
I remember at another time reading Guizot’s ‘History of France.’ This
was a real experience and came near starting me to thinking. There is
something in the quality of the French mind to which I have always felt
a reluctant kinship. They are the only people I know who can leap into
an enormous vocabulary of words and beat them up with the wings of
their spirit into a fine hysterical eloquence.

I cannot tell how I missed my cue, but my suspicion now is that I must
have made a more or less deliberate effort to develop mentally. I do
recall regretfully certain intellectual flutterings which are never to
be confounded with the stirrings of the creative mind.

When it is all over, or nearly over, and we look back with the wisdom
of all our experiences gained, we know that love is the best thing in
life and that it leads through whatever shadows to the best things we
are capable of. So I know now that my devotion to little Faith was more
stimulating and informing than anything else.

In contrast to this tender happiness I enjoyed as a mother, I was never
free from a nameless fear and anxiety for my husband. It turned out
that his duties as the head of the Greek department in the college
did not divert his mind from that absorbing passion for peace in God.
Rather the fatalism of the Greek mind reacted disastrously upon his
own mind. In addition to this his vitality was depleted by overwork.
No matter how pale saints are--and I have observed that as a rule they
have poor complexions--I shall always contend that it is easier to
step up and trust the Lord if you are in good health. Lundy’s strength
began to fail and he passed more frequently into those dark periods
of despair. So I labored with him in good faith according to his
interpretation of the Scriptures. I remember now the premonitions I had
of unimaginable misfortunes.

Years passed and our fate had come upon us, driving us far from our
little world at Oxford before I finally realized that this was not a
spiritual condition from which Lundy suffered, but a very real and
dangerous disorder of the mind; melancholia, which took one form after
another of religious mania.

I have written out in another place the life we lived during this
period, but not the terror and silence that fell upon me. This cannot
be set down in words; the frantic efforts I made to save him from
himself, and to protect him from that terrible world in the Church. I
know where the spirit of all tragedies dwells--in the silence which you
dare not break, with even one call for help. I contracted the habit of
holding my breath in these years of suspense. Even when my body slept
it seemed to me my heart was forever sitting up with Lundy in the dark
hours of the night.

This was long before the Great War, but I distinctly recall how I
used to wish I could find relief in a real battle, see the dreadful
face of my enemy and feel his wounds rather than face the powers and
principalities of Lundy’s terrible darkness.

I fell sick under the strain and lay at the very doors of death for a
long time, but not wishfully. I survived the predictions of various
physicians for no other reason, I believe, than that I felt obliged to
live and stand by my husband.

I did it. No one can say I failed him or ever drew back once from the
shadows that finally engulfed him. I had written ‘A Circuit Rider’s
Wife’ and put the crown he so richly deserved upon him before he passed
away. I remember being in a hurry to do that.

Nothing was further from my plans than to become a writer, but I
must have already begun the practice of studying characters, for I
remember all those people whom I knew then, not their faces but their
attributes, their inside minds. Otherwise, I am inclined to believe now
that this was not an important period in my own mental development. It
seems to me that I had very little raiment on my thoughts, not much
sweetness or color. That bright and halcyon past which came back to me
later in a dark time was eclipsed by some sort of adolescent egotism of
the mind. I remember being very smart, which is a form of stupidity.
I try not to remember it, but it occurs to me that I may have felt
intellectual. I entertained views too noble or too bitter to be true. I
must have done some soul-stretching of my mental neck.

Nothing that I have ever written about myself humbles me so much as
this confession, for I have observed the same state of mind in others.
It is ugly, insincere, and leads to maudlin movements, agitations, and
other disorders of our times, especially among women. The wonder to me
now is that I did not get the idea that I had a message for the world.
God in his mercy saved me from feminine screech of this emotion which
so many of us mistake for noble inspiration.




XXIV

HOMELY PLEASURE


I was thirty years of age before the character of my mind differed
consciously from that of any other woman’s mind who is a devoted
wife and mother, and, by marriage, deeply and sincerely pious. I was
backward with my needle, but necessity compelled me to become skillful
in this art. I made my own clothes and they proclaimed the fact. But
I was more successful with dear little Faith’s things. She came up in
the drawn-line period. We could not afford linen, but every ruffle and
hem on her white muslin frocks was hemstitched. The gathers were rolled
and whipped. The yokes were elaborately carved with the needle into
blossoms and webs worked into the drawn threads.

Faith was an adorable mite of a woman from the very beginning of her
life. She felt her feathers and could not resist the joy of switching
when she pranced forth in one of these dresses. I wore the long skirts
of that period and held them up behind after the manner of those former
ladies. Likewise, Faith invariably reached back, caught a fold of her
exceedingly abbreviated skirt between her thumb and forefinger, the
other three fingers hoisted and curled as daintily as if she held an
afternoon teacup. Then, bent slightly forward, head thrown proudly
back, she frisked forth glorified in her own pride. It comforts me now
to remember that I never chided her for these airs and that she had
the joy of her things.

They really were beautiful little garments, if I do say it who should
not boast of my handiwork. You may have observed that love can impart
to a woman who has no sense of style about her own clothes, a rare
genius for dressing her girl child.

I had no domestic accomplishments, but I had one hard-and-fast rule
as a loving wife. This was to appeal to the eye. I have a vaguely
guilty feeling that I was not an exquisitely neat housekeeper--which
immediately became a belligerent feeling the moment some one referred
to the fact--but I always kept one place attractive in the house that
would strike Lundy’s eye as he entered the door.

I remember once after we had left Oxford and our fortunes were at the
lowest ebb we lived in two rooms far up in the mountains. I had saved
his dearer books, some draperies and precious ornaments from the sale
of our household things in Oxford, but not enough to furnish a whole
room cheerfully. So I massed our wealth in one corner of it.

There was an ugly little stove set far enough out to admit of a seat
behind it on both sides of the corner. I had it put in, no more than
a low wide shelf against the wall. But it was softly cushioned and I
covered it with a dark blue chenille curtain. I covered some old sofa
pillows with the red-and-yellow borders of these curtains and piled
them like gaudy mushrooms on this seat. Some distance above I put in
narrow shelves for the books. These were arranged without regard for
their titles or inside substance, but to bring out as much color as
possible. A red or green backed book was precious and must be placed
where the light would fall on it.

There was a vase on the top shelf, two brass candlesticks, and wedged
in the corner was a remarkable plaster-of-Paris little boy, quite
naked, sitting cross-legged on a square pedestal, reading from a large
book open upon his knees. I take it that he was an erudite child,
because from the looks of his pouncy body he could not have been more
than three years old. Lundy had given me this thing in an opulent
moment years before. Remembering the classical Greek turn of his mind,
I cannot believe it truly represented his taste, only what he could
afford to buy. But he craved statuary of the graver sort to the last
and treated himself now and then to the moulded bust of a great poet or
a great philosopher. I keep them all, though the little boy has lost
half his book, broken off long since in our travels.

Two very wide chenille curtains remained. These were split and hung
at the windows on either side of this corner. I do not suppose a
professional decorator would have admired the general effect, but
compared with the remaining space and furnishing of that wretched room,
it was palatial.

On very cold evenings when Lundy came in, the stove would be glowing
like a grotesquely deformed red-hot coal. The two candles would be
lighted and flickering bravely. The little boy high up in his corner
between them would still be studiously reading his book. The books on
the shelves below would be lined up brightly like old friends waiting
as usual to spend the evening with us. And Lundy, merely giving me
the peck of a kiss as he passed, would make straight for that long
cushioned seat behind the stove. He stretched out there like a wealthy
man and read or scribbled notes for a sermon. I do not think he ever
really saw the other part of that wretched room.

This was the life I lived then and the mind I had then. Good,
tender and very anxious for my dear ones, but not by any stretch of
imagination an intellectual existence. I doubt if we can be very active
in such a love affair as this and be intellectual at the same time.
Love itself is the self-expression of such a woman, which is something
we hear more about these days than in those days, when it seems to me
women loved more giftedly than they do now.




XXV

LOVE AND AUTHORSHIP


Mothers are especially methodical. Love makes them and tempers their
minds in the beginning. They find out how to love each one of their
little children differently, then they settle down in their maternal
formulas of affection. These children grow up, their natures change,
but this makes no difference. She remembers that Thomas was a sensitive
little boy and had to be treated tenderly. So she goes on making
allowances for his beautiful, sensitive nature, although he may have
grown up into a cold-blooded wretch who has made his fortune on a
widow’s mite.

By the same token, she never forgets that her other son was a normal
hard-headed youngster who must be disciplined and required no petting.
So she goes on giving him the lick and the promise of a sterner
affection, although he may now be a broken-hearted man who has failed
on account of going into business with the meaner, more excitable
brother, and is very much in need of tenderness. But she apportioned
her affections between them like an estate she willed them long ago.
Now she is too old and _non compos mentis_ affectionally to change her
will.

Authors do their work the same way. They find out how to write. They
get their own method, a certain set of characters, and they stick to
this method and these characters, with a few lay figures added here
and there in different stories. What I mean is that their leading
heroes and heroines show a marked family resemblance to one another in
every succeeding book. And why not? They are all out of the same parent
mind. I should recognize a certain author’s heroine anywhere on earth,
even if she escapes from all the stories in which she figures. She is
a young woman who usually works her way up, when the reader has every
reason to believe she is bound to fall. I have not seen her lately, but
she used to make me very anxious on account of her threadbare skirt and
having to heat a can of tomato soup over an alcohol burner behind her
washstand screen. I do hope she has kept her chastity and married well
as usual these late years, since I have been too busy to keep up with
her struggles. She was a model and an inspiration then to every working
girl without a job. Which, when you think about it, is very high praise
for her procreator.

I had been one of the most diligent unknown authors in this country for
ten years before circumstances thrust me into the written rôle of ‘A
Circuit Rider’s Wife.’ It was then that I seemed to have found myself
as an interpreter and at last capable of producing that literature of
the heart which is peculiar to all of us. I am not wholly in my right
mind in any other character now. She knows the very gist of everything
I feel or know about men and women.

I would not attempt to tell how earnestly and unsuccessfully I have
tried to be a younger, lovelier, and more attractive woman in fiction.
Being a youthful, coquettish heroine is frightfully hypocritical and
embarrassing. If I am compelled to play that rôle, I always put that
dearer, wiser old woman in as a neighbor to the girl so that I may rest
and dwell in her for a scene now and then.

I am far removed these many years from the circumstances that made
the ‘Circuit Rider’s Wife.’ She was very poor and enjoyed her
economies; I am now no longer poor, but cannot bring myself to commit
an extravagance. She walked very softly before the Lord, and I walk
even more softly before the world, on account of having attracted some
attention from that quarter which she never had. She was always anxious
for the peace and fate of her circuit rider; now I am lonely for the
lack of these cares, and Lundy has passed away into what may be called
the literature of my soul. She went to church every Sabbath day, and
I do not go. Nevertheless she constrains me. Sometimes even yet the
mind she had comes back to me like a song and I am tempted to sit down
in the amen corner of my years, tell everything that is comforting to
know, sing a hymn and try to lead us all in prayer! I seem to slip off
into that same old-fashioned tenderness for men and women we used to
feel for mourners kneeling about the altar during a revival.

Then the woman I am now looks about me and takes a more sensible view.
What the world really needs is to have its emotional nature disciplined
and trained even more carefully than we take the pains to develop the
purely mental faculties. Praying will not meet this emergency.

My hope is to get at least ten strides ahead of this woman I used
to be in the record I am now writing of my mind, which has changed
considerably since she managed its downsittings and uprisings.

The question is whether I can do it. As we grow older it seems to me we
break none of the bonds that formerly bound us; we simply add to them.
I doubt very seriously if there is any such experience as liberty. It
is a notion we get from not remembering for a moment the habits that
bind us no less in the spirit than in our more obvious affairs.




XXVI

THE MIND OF THE WRITER


I had been writing ten years before I discovered the amazing capacity
even the ordinary mind has for creating from experience and memory,
and that its powers of production are limited only by one’s courage to
think, and by the amount of physical strength and endurance one can
afford to spend on the performance. After the ‘Circuit Rider’s Wife’
was written I was in the gravest state of anxiety lest I should never
muster the material for another book.

About this time I met an old friend who now holds the chair of
metaphysics in one of our great universities. I may have given some
intimation of my despairing state. In any case, he instructed me in the
laws governing mind. He drew a diagram of my mind on a piece of paper
and showed me how it worked. I had only one consolation as I studied
this thing--that he did not know or suspect the thoughts I was thinking
about him at that moment. They were not complimentary.

I rejected his theory, but I could not get the picture of his infernal
diagram out of my mind. Every time I sat down to work at my desk,
I could see the lines and segments of my mind on that piece of
paper and the dot where a thought would probably appear. The result
was a hysteria of self-consciousness mentally which made thinking
impossible. Quite by accident that great student hit upon the method
of obstructing thought. The mind turned like a worm on itself!

In my opinion it is wiser not to fumble with this delicate piece of
machinery, no matter how much you may find out by tearing it to pieces.
What I know is that he who peeps at his mind will never have the use of
it. It is wiser to leave not only your mind but your gender severely
alone if you hope to do good spirit-level thinking. It would not
surprise me at all if these were not the bonds which do somehow bind us
to God, to be accepted, but not understood.

After all is said and done and taught that we can possibly learn from
others, every man faces his own problems and solves them the best way
he can. The lawyer learns law, then he practices law according to the
bias of his own mind and character. Maybe he is a shyster. Maybe he
has an honest legal sense. It all depends on the kind of man he is.
The same thing is true about the physician. After a while he gets his
own mental habits of diagnosing our complaints and diseases. If his
mind catches and holds some fixed idea about neurasthenic tendencies,
apt as not he will diagnose your case accordingly, although you may
be having fits on account of an ulcer in the stomach. In any case, he
finally works out a system of favorite prescriptions. Then he fits us
to his medicines, and his methods as he grows older, no matter how new
our disease may be. He cannot help it. His mind has made him and it is
too old, inelastic, to add another cubit to his wisdom or courage as a
physician. If you are about to become a patient, the risks are six of
one and half a dozen of the other whether you choose a young doctor in
the experimental stage of his practice or this old one who has settled
down in his methods, because they are reasonably successful and rarely
ever result in your death.

Preachers are the same way. They see God according to their lights,
make sermons until they exhaust their vision. Then they go on preaching
this same body of thought as long as they live under various texts from
the Scriptures.

I am wondering how a literary critic would go about reviewing the
mind of an author instead of his book. He would probably decline the
assignment. He is a judge of the material, the copy a writer produces,
but he is no mental mechanic to pass judgment upon the amazing
motor of our faculties. The best he could do would be to write an
illuminating essay upon the times in which an author lived; the effect,
by inference, of that particular period of civilization upon his work;
whether he was well and in good circumstances, or wrote under the
pressure of ill-health and poverty.

But none of these circumstances would account for the main fact that he
became an author instead of, say, a fishmonger or a banker. The great
majority of poor people or sick people never take it out on the world
by writing books. Neither does their state of health determine their
literary style or their choice of material to convert into copy. Robert
Louis Stevenson was an invalid, suffering from an incurable malady.
By all the laws governing such a life he was due to die early without
accomplishing anything. But he sat up in bed and wrote the healthiest,
most entrancing stories of his times, and died later.

The mind is something else, not us. It is an instrument set up in us,
controlled by spiritual forces which reach it through the medium of our
emotions. It can be well and powerful when we are weak and ill. ‘By my
spirit,’ thus also sayeth such a man. On the other hand, the mind is
frequently ill to the point of dissolution when we are enjoying perfect
health. Witness the sickly slime copy produced by a decadent writer
who may be an athlete physically. ‘By my spirit,’ also says such a man
who has adopted his powers and principalities of darkness. My notion
is that it is a choice between spirits which determines the quality
of your thinking, but not the power with which you can do it. That, I
suppose, is the personal equation in the whole phenomenon and would
depend upon the strength of your emotions and the capacity of your
mental motor.

It is not for me to venture into the realm of metaphysics with my
cheerful, flat-footed ignorance of this subject, but I am now writing
the record of my own mind in relation to my work as an author merely
from experience. The conclusions I have reached in this manner may be
erroneous from the standpoint of the professional students. But I have
frequently erred with the happiest practical results in my own living
and achieving.

I remember being very much upset upon learning that poetry, religion,
and sex animation were all products of the same emotional reactions.
This was a serious matter. If I could not dispose of it in a manner
satisfying to my mental and moral platform in living, it would take
the luster off my thoughts and render me some sort of automaton in
spiritual consciousness. You are not really the author of a thought
which splashes up like spray from a wave of emotion which has its
origin in sex. This information was too diminishing. Also, I prefer to
believe in God, not because of my sex, even if I was of the other sex,
but because I have a spiritual consciousness which only the idea of
Providence can satisfy.

Still, I had a squeamish feeling that we probably were made precisely
by this economical pattern, one emotion carrying all our sensations;
thrift in expenses being one of the axioms in creation as I have
observed it.

Any sensible person must have reached the same conclusion I reached,
provided he did not consult too many learned authorities, but stuck
like a leech to his Scriptures, which was something like this: By
nature, delicacy, and decency, by all prayers, every hope and noble
ambition, the sensations of sex are so mixed in us with the highest
emotions of religion, eloquence, and every sublime imagination that we
have been for ages the parents of spiritually minded beings instead of
brutes.

I suppose this was the only way to insure such a phenomenon in an
apparently physical and carnal world. We are thus born convinced of
immortality by that admirable device of the Almighty. I am ready to
stretch a neck ahead of the current animal propaganda concerning sex
and contend that it is probably the basic principle of the instinct
we have of immortality. How else does the lowest type of savage also
arrive at faith in God and keep company with ghosts and spirits?
Superstition is the name we apply to that, when it may be a much
sounder, though more elemental, faith than we have ourselves. In any
case, how do you account for the character of his superstitions or for
his ability to produce them at all? He has no Bible, no literature,
neither theologians nor scholars to direct his mental processes. But
he has his emotions. He is some kind of stick-in-the-mud poet, and he
arrives at the idea of God because he is a man. A dog cannot do it,
though he has the same procreating instinct, but is not informed with
the spiritual sense.

These conclusions have given me great satisfaction as a writer. I am
never embarrassed if a particularly entrancing thought comes to me.
I do not attribute it to the inspirations of my gender, but to the
spiritual quality of the mind produced by gender in general, if you
will have it so, not that I am personally disposed to dig down to the
rudiments of my thoughts. Some mysteries are sacred so long as they are
hidden, but shocking when they are exposed. It seems to me that the
tendency of our times is to suspect sex of something which is really
good, but that we are inclined to make something bad of what we suspect.




XXVII

DO YOU WANT TO WRITE?


I should be slow to advise the most gifted person to enter the literary
profession. It is a life of infinite labor and hardship. The rewards
are commensurate if you win them. But comparatively few who strive to
enter in do so. Nobody lacks the sense to write, I believe; but most
people lack the intuition, that hidden truth out of which romance and
poetry and all literary illusions are made.

Very few people who read books know or suspect the literary casualties
in an author’s life. The most successful, as the least renowned of us,
suffer amazing losses in labor and a corresponding depreciation in
self-confidence. You may buy a seat on the stock exchange, get a ticker
and do business there according to your own secret information about
the market. But you cannot buy a seat among the editors in this country
if you are a writer. Neither can you discover the ticker in their mind
which determines the worth and unworthiness of your copy. They also are
taking a chance with the public which reads. It is a fickle public, apt
to change its mind any time.

Nothing is less profitable than to study a magazine with reference to
producing copy peculiar to it. You are almost sure to make the mistake
of writing something similar to the article or story you have studied,
when your common sense should warn you that the editor will not want to
repeat that dose. You have been subtly guilty of a repetition of the
motive back of the story you took for a pattern, which is reason enough
to expect that the thing will be refused.

An editor must have a kaleidoscopic mind. He cannot tell you with any
degree of accuracy what he wants, because he does not know very far in
advance what his readers want. But he can tell you as quick as a flash
what he does not want, because he has more past experience than you can
imagine to guide him in rejecting unavailable copy.

The best bet, I discovered long ago, was to find out what was true and
vital in the experience of the greatest number of people and to write
that. As a rule it is so old and elemental as to have become identical
with them, like a man’s ribs. He rarely ever thinks of them. There is
such a body of thought and emotion in all of us of which we no longer
speak. We have lost the words to do so. But when we see them written
out it is as if we had recovered some dearer speech of ourselves.

The language we use is for the obvious, the things we do and say, or
for the impressions we wish to make upon others. We have ten thousand
dialogues for lovers, a considerable vocabulary for speaking piety and
eloquence, and we are not short on narrative sentences; but I challenge
any man to prove that it is easy to tell in words what is going on in
his mind which is peculiar to him and not to be told. He is thinking
them in the same way he breathes to live--by way of being mentally
conscious. He is registering himself in every emotion, motive, and
desire faster than these mental sensations can be translated into
words.

Language is artificial. We only use it to be heard, or to be seen in
the written word, or when we are so moved that we are practically
talking to ourselves. The greater part of the thinking we do is
so mixed with feeling that it is like a circulatory system of
consciousness, therefore the only absolutely veracious mental versions
of what we really are.

To set down as much of this copy of us as possible has been my
particular business as an author. It requires a sort of loving cunning
in the use of words which has been the most fascinating feature of my
work. Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and
pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that
makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the
reader’s mind. If you take pains, make every one count like a stroke
in the picture of a secret trait which is peculiar to all of us, the
individual reader gets the same shock of surprise that he would have
if his mother had been eavesdropping his mind. It makes him nervous,
wondering how much else she has heard.

As to that, it is like seeing God; you cannot do it without being pure
in heart. So I doubt if we could interpret the secret hearts of men
and women without feeling very close to them in love and sympathy.
My observation of meaner-minded people is that they never really
understand other people, only what is evil or potentially evil in them.
I reckon it is a blessed provision of Providence that we only see
through the glass darkly when our deeds are evil. Otherwise the wicked
would have a frightful advantage over the innocent and good.

One of the most profitable experiments I make along this line is to
write out good impulses peculiar to people who are not good, but have a
perpetual hankering after their might-have-been virtues.

They invariably rise like woefully undone children to the bait. I get
a batch of letters from sinners the moment such a paragraph picture of
their futile goodness appears in print. Some of them very smart and
bitter, but feeling that soothing plaster I have laid on the wounds
their sins have made in them. Others are low in the dust. They do not
expect to rise. Still, they want me to know they have enjoyed the
relief of a few tears on their cheeks.

I do think this is a dear thing about men, even the worst of them--how
they will confess their tears of grief or regret to a woman in whom
they believe or whose confidence they desire to win. If she is an
elderly person with some wisdom of their sex, she knows that these
are histrionic tears, shed to move her. Still, it is an artless sort
of compliment they pay her good old simplicity. But if we should tell
how many men and which men we have seen weep, the world would never
believe us! The poor things are driven to it as we are driven to little
hysterical manifestations with our dearer men which we should never try
to put over on another woman. Before other men they must play the part
of pride, strength, and courage, even if they have no such attributes;
but once in so often the last of them will break down before one of
us, quiver his chin and let his tears flow, because he knows that we
know he is really a child who never grows up, begging for cake when he
is a boy and for sympathy when he is a man.

Very few lost and undone women ever show up, but now and then one
comes in a letter, lays her head on my Circuit Rider’s Widow’s knees
and whispers that she remembers when she felt like that, referring to
some paragraph, say, in ‘My Book and Heart.’ This is as near as one of
them ever comes to admitting that she no longer has the right to feel
like that. And none of them ever sign their names. Thus they let you
know they do not expect an answer. It is their sad way of walking like
ghosts for a few lines close to what they believe is a kind heart.

It must be fearful not to be good if you are a woman, because you never
can forgive yourself, while a man can and will do so with the least
encouragement from you. If the woman he loves shrives him, he will rise
up and strut like a spiritual peacock without ever taking the trouble
to lay his case before the Lord in prayer. He is the greatest economist
in contrition the world ever saw.

But when you think about it, this only goes to prove how transparent
they are. I am by men as I am by the more occult Scriptures--they are
not difficult to understand if you have the right mind toward them, not
antagonistic or suspicious.

But I am always careful never to let one know I am reading him. Nothing
upsets a man so quickly as to realize that you are seeing him maneuver
in and out of sight behind the lines of the rôle he is reciting so
well to you. He is offended. He takes his leave of you like a puppy
with its tail between its legs, or he goes off with a prideful stride.
Presently he tells somebody that he does not like that woman. But he
does. He simply dislikes the glimpse he had of himself mirrored in her
old Sea-of-Galilee mind.

I never answer such letters. Let them read Paul’s epistles! But I do
feel closer kin to them than one ever does to the comfortable saints or
to the brazenly virtuous.

When you have been a mother and known such richness of hovering love
as that, after you are childless the wings of your heart do feel
strangely empty. I have sometimes considered adopting a bunch of bad
grown-up children and starting them all over at their A B C’s of morals
and decencies. But it would never do. This whole countryside would be
working presently with runaway children. I have a vague suspicion that
I am not an easy person to live with. I have a hot and heady temper,
and exacting standards acquired in these lonely hills where there is
no world to obstruct or soften my convictions about what is right or
wrong, and about the exceedingly early hour when dutiful people should
get up and go about their tasks. As the stepmother of sinners I might
be rather terrible in my manifestations. Besides, I could not love them
as a real mother loves. I should lack that essential wisdom in dealing
with them. So I have abandoned the idea, except to think about it.




XXVIII

EXPRESSING ONE’S SELF


Personally, I do not think so much of self-expression as a noble
yearning. I would not go so far as to suggest that it is a wave of
feminine psychosis; but the suspicion grows in my mind that it may be
a sort of hysteria peculiar to that class of people who have boastful
souls and considerable mortal vanity, neither of which can be financed
by the finer art of living privately. We notice it in women now, as
we do other symptoms which were formerly characteristic only of men.
Job had a notable case of it. He fretted his wife until at last she
lost patience with his groaning vanity about his integrity and advised
him to curse God and die. Carlyle made his wife miserable while he
expressed himself like a winged leviathan in ‘Sartor Resartus.’ It is
easier to write an epic than to live your own life becomingly with no
audience to cheer the performance. Therefore we are a trifle long on
epics and short on achieving a good record of ourselves in secret.
Women have at last become infected with this disorder of the mind, a
pathetic desire to cast themselves on the wide screen of the world in
some rôle of self-expression.

My mail has been laden with letters from them for years asking advice
about how to do it. They are either distracted spinsters or married
women who are childless and unhappy. Their homes and their husbands
have got on their nerves. They are the pseudo heroines of their own
sorrows, futile egotists in tears who wish to publish their tears in
a book. They have only a martyr illusion of themselves and no sense
at all of other people. They are totally lacking in that quality
of the medium without which there is no such thing as a truthful
interpretation of any life. God himself could not teach such a woman
to write an honest sentence about herself, much less her husband,
concerning whom she is determined to reveal the worst.

Recently a mean little wife with a soul-pulling use of words sent
in a long account of her grievances. She had married beneath her
own position in life. Her husband was an honest man, but not--oh,
not a gentleman! He did not understand or appreciate her. He was
cruel, contemptuous, and overbearing. Judging by the way she praised
herself, it was easy to infer that she was one of those women who
make a damnable use of their virtues and would not lend one for any
consideration to her husband. I suppose she wore that sad accusative
look which provokes the worst in any man. She felt that it might
relieve the tension if she could find some means of self-expression and
she wanted advice about writing the revelations of her married life.

On account of being partly Irish, I am not always able to resist the
temptation to use the shillalah of my wit upon these little Judases.

‘Do not write the record of your wrongs,’ I advised her; ‘but meet your
husband with a smile the next time he comes in and strike him over the
head with some blunt instrument. He will probably clean you up, which
is precisely what you need. This will much more quickly relieve your
nervous tension than writing a book, which is a drastic business and
very hard on the nerves, even when you tell the truth.’

The women’s organizations have a less sensational way of cashing in
these unhappy ones. They give them a task to perform in connection with
their vast activities. They are doing everything, maintaining schools
and clinics, they are lobbying for bills. They are the most rapacious
collectors for charity on earth. They have their publicity departments
and their propaganda. They are setting up monuments and preserving the
memory of honorable men. They almost invariably do what they set out to
do and they are the only corporations in this country that get their
labor free of charge, that even collect dues from their workers--which
will indicate the fierce passion in the women of our times to achieve
worthy ends and to express themselves in honorable service before the
world, whatever happens to their homes, husbands, and children.

No one respects them more than I do, but a burned child is afraid of
fire. For so many years I did not have the use of my own life. It was
controlled entirely by the rules of the Methodist Church and limited by
the adversities of a circuit-rider’s life. Never in this world would I
yield it to the executive committee of any kind of woman’s board. I am
a woman myself and know very well how much greater our talent is for
governing others than the most despotic form of government founded by
men.

My idea is that the good little life, with no publicity screen in the
background, leads with less confusion and certainly less embarrassment
to peace and happiness.

The theory is excellent and does me credit written out in words. But a
master mind could never put into words the web I have spun upon it to
ensnare my own life, liberty, and happiness.

For years past I have felt my immortal spirit zooning in it like an
insect with its legs tied. No woman ever longed for self-expression as
I long now to escape from my own plan of happiness.




XXIX

SITTING IN THE PUBLIC EYE


I could have been contented with intimate blessings. I do not remember
ever to have craved a career. I do not now understand those who strive
so brilliantly and senselessly for recognition, fame, and one sort of
distinction or another.

For me the career of an author was purely accidental and resulted from
a desperate emergency. I have written all this out more particularly
in another book, but while we are on this subject of careers and
recognition I may as well set down now what I have to say about that.

Anything you do, however well, which draws the world’s attention is a
fearful thing, not to be lightly sought. And I do not refer in this
connection to the competitive jealousies engendered by success, having
had no experiences along this line. What I am trying to tell you is
that with the rewards one earns in this business some right to live
privately passes away. Your habitation may be divided from the crowded
world by a thousand hills, but there are voluntary biographers in it
who create the life they think you live back there. I could write much
more entrancing legends about myself.

I have an ambition to sit gracefully in the public eye, one hand
resting on my desk, neatly littered with manuscript, and the other
curled like a white lily across my breast. When you are posing thus
in your own mind it is disconcerting to learn that you are a country
policeman, conscientious in the discharge of your duties. I respect
policemen, but I should shrink from crowding into that profession.

If you have written much testifying to your Christian faith, even if
you do admit a somewhat crank-sided human nature, it is depressing to
learn that you are an atheist smoking with bad doctrines.

After that happened, I had no sooner retired behind that Scripture
which says, ‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute
you, and say all manner of evil against you, for my sake ... for great
is your reward in heaven’--and I am taking particular satisfaction in
the dark intimation as to the probable nature of this reward--than
I was startled by the report that I had become a Catholic. This is
a compliment which I shall never deserve, even though I am totally
lacking in Protestant animus against the Catholics. If you have been
one of those certified widows so highly recommended in Paul’s epistle
to Timothy it feels very queer to hear that you have been cutting a
swath in the social life of Havana.

Not everything you hear about yourself can be considered good
publicity. And if you have delicate sensibilities, the currycomb of
public imagination frequently rubs your vanities the wrong way.

You can never choose your own duties or pastimes again. You must work
at your thoughts. They hold you and compel you like voices calling to
be heard.

Sometimes now I still feel the womanly instinct stirring in me to sew
a fine seam. I want to lay a pattern on a piece of beautiful cloth,
cut out something sweet and make it. I long to gather a ruffle with my
fingers, pin one end of it down and scratch the gathers with my needle
as I used to do long ago. But I never can do it. No time. No such
cunning left now in my fingers. I have become a sewless woman.

When it is a fine, large, perfectly rounded day, with the sun shining
and all the leaves talking in the wind and a faint perfume of woodland
flowers floats in through the window like an invitation, I would give
much to cast my pen far from me and follow it out and away to the deep
green valleys where these blossoms bloom. But I cannot take the day
off. I must stay here and write down the things my mind makes believe.
No real blossoms, only the things I know--so little, compared with what
the trees tell and the river sings, if you know how to listen.

Every author knows what I mean. We become the slaves of our thoughts
that must be written before they fade into forgetfulness.

Invitations to speak upon public occasions are among my most grievous
embarrassments. Why is it inferred that one is or can be a public
speaker because she has written a book? Writing is a very private
business. I do not know any other occupation which requires so much
privacy unless it is a life of prayer or a life of crime.

During these many years with a bee in my bonnet and a pen in my hand
I have practically lost my oral faculties. I cannot scintillate on
a rostrum. The flare of so many faces would put out my light. I am
accustomed to work in the presence of three open-eyed windows which
look upon a wide green forest. Much motion and life out there, but
complete and magnificent indifference to the mortal mind in here
struggling with the adverb of an idea.

I am not apologizing, you understand, for not being able to live up to
this side demand of a literary reputation. I am simply telling what
happens to one not anxious to dine on her own fame in a public place.
Many people will not believe an author shrinks from committing this act
of sublimated cannibalism, because so many of them do it, especially
the English writers imported by our women’s clubs. But I cannot be made
to believe they enjoy the performance. One must have spent a while in
England, realized how repressed their enthusiasms are, for Americans
to understand how these speakers must suffer from our goggle-eyed
reverence for their voice culture, their outrageous pronunciations and
their perfectly exquisite intellectuality. Nothing, I believe, but a
sense of financial duty to themselves brings them to us.

Meanwhile women are now the best public speakers in this country. They
have something to say, and they are saying it with charm and courage.
Heaven forbid that I should ever expose my old ruminating mind among
them on the stage! What I mean is this: When you write you may take
infinite time and patience to say what you want to say. You write in
ten different ways. You reface it and begin again and again until the
breathless, speechless idea you had lives and shines. This is how
slow the pen-traveling mind may be; but try fumbling the ball of your
thought like that before an audience and see what happens to you! The
reporters would be justified in publishing the news that you had a
stroke which rendered you practically inarticulate soon after you began
your address.

As for preparing an address and delivering it with your eyes and
spectacles fixed upon the page instead of the audience, I know this is
intolerable, for I have been in many an audience on similar occasions
and it has frequently occurred to me that the offending person might
have chosen something much better from a book to read.

That which so many people strive to win must be a good thing, but I am
simply telling you what fame costs. Once you grow accustomed to being
famous, you do not realize it, but you are never quite your humble,
honest self. No matter how tight you keep the lid on, there is some
watered stock of vanity inside. You are always in danger of the thing’s
coming off and of giving yourself an air or two. No man or woman was
ever so distinguished that this exhibition did not make him ridiculous,
especially to those of meaner minds.

But the final and most depressing part comes in the evening of your
great day when you are no longer great. Your career has ended. Fame
fades like a withered rose in your hair, and you are forgotten even
if your works are not. Other writers, whom you naturally feel are not
doing so well, are popping up in the public eye.

I am still sufficiently able-bodied in my mind and spirit not to
notice the crowding forward of these youngsters; but I have a sort of
presentiment that after a while, when I am no longer strong enough to
practice nobility of mind, it is going to hurt some to do without the
praise and admiration they get. I am dreading the time when I shall
be so lonely, so much in need of a little recognition that I may be
anxious to accept an invitation to sit on the stage behind the speaker
of the evening.

I can feel myself like a pain sitting up there, very old and gray,
maybe a little soft in my head, but so pleased to be present and face
foremost to the audience! I am waiting for the speaker to conclude his
oration and for the applause meant for him to die down. I am hoping
like a poor old hungry child that a few people in the audience will
recognize me as the author of ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife,’ or the woman
who wrote ‘My Book and Heart’ many years ago. I am all in a flutter
lest no one press forward through the crowd about the speaker and clasp
me by my old palsied hand to say how glad he is to see me, and how well
I am looking--not a day older! How do I manage to keep so young? And he
will never forget when this or that circuit-rider story came out. And
how he loves ‘My Book and Heart’! Maybe he has just read it all over
again. I shall be hoping he will say something like that. Meanwhile
I am glowing with childish pleasure at this spoofing, but trying to
maintain the air of dignity I used to have when I really was myself.

Heavens, how I do despise those people, now in the strength of their
years, who look with contempt or indifference upon the old children we
become!

This is the lightning of fate already flashing in my sky. For I have
observed the weather at the end of more than one distinguished career.
It rarely ever is very warm and bright. You have outgrown the normal
mediocre sense of yourself, and you are no longer able to keep up the
intellectual expenses of your reputation as a famous person.




XXX

ON LAYING DOWN YOUR LIFE


I doubt if the best people live their own lives. They make themselves
the shield and buckler of another’s life, or they are the foundations
of peace and security upon which many lives are built.

What impresses me is that they seem to pass beyond the reach of any
rewards. They lose the capacity to receive or to shine. If the most
devoted mother survives the sacrifices she has made, it is with
pathetically folded hands, as the spectator of the brilliant careers of
her sons and daughters. I suppose mothers get some sort of half joy out
of being merely present; but even that is sacrificial, for they are not
puffed up over establishing these young ones; they are simply rejoicing
in their success. Something has happened to them, they are tragically
emptied of self and cannot share the lives they have made.

It is the same way with preachers, priests, prophets, all that class
of men who spend themselves for others--they lose the capacity to
live. They are those good, quiet shadows in the background everywhere,
strangely contented with your fame or your prosperity, not neglected,
but used up.

We are very good about making them the objects of our benefits. We get
them out and show them off now and then for conscience’ sake, but they
never really enjoy the parade except to be in our reflected glory.
They are dead to themselves, which is being dead indeed.

Just practice laying down your life for others and see what happens to
you! These others will take it, strengthened by you, and go on about
their affairs. I have never seen that Scripture fulfilled in this world
which reads, ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but
whosoever will lose his life for my sake the same shall find it’; so
it must be fulfilled in the world to come, which is a long way off and
very mysterious, geographically speaking.

Sometimes when I am very low in my mind I get a feeling of terror about
the Word. So many Scriptures read like laws every whit as merciless as
those which control life in the natural world. All that lives has been
and must be fertilized by that decay provided by death. Every flower
fades, every leaf falls to enrich the soil for next year’s leaves and
blossoms. Must we also lay down our lives forever and ever as living
sacrifices that those who come after us shall be stronger and wiser to
win what we missed of life and happiness? Is no mercy to be shown to
the very good? Must they wait to be raised from the dust of all things
to receive their rewards?

Such thinking makes me nervous and a trifle indignant about the way
those people who do not lay down their lives seem to flourish more than
we do who have served long sentences in that wearying position.

I do not know how it may be with women of other sections, but in this
part of the country if you do your own work something goes out of you;
not virtue--you are likely to multiply frightfully in virtues--but that
bright, fluttering grace of the spirit more becoming to us than all the
nobler attributes folds up and disappears. No matter how conscientious
she is about setting aside a certain part of each day to improve
herself and to keep up with her husband’s times--I never knew one to
keep up her music--music is one of the things that go out of her--she
cannot do it. She is so busy doing her duty she falls fatally behind
his times if he is a man who marches with them. I do not know why this
is so, but it is probably a feminine geographical phenomenon.

This is a blessed and glorified land; there is a fragrant inertia
in our climate suitable more particularly for the production of the
sweetly sitting inspirational woman. She does not need to know so much
in the way of mere learning in order to be placidly wise. The dust
down here is an alluvial soil, humanly speaking; it has been warmed
and brightened for so many ages by the sun, the perfume of so many
flowers has sunk into it, the sorrows and misfortunes of a great people
have sanctified it. My feeling is that it has a cultural quality which
must be got through higher education and the most poignant mental
exercises in the other sections where it has been spewed up into
hoarfrost for a corresponding number of ages, stauncher dust, but not
by nature so pleasant when raised, say, into an able citizen, a strong
ballot-bearing woman. Therefore it is not so important for our women
to exercise these rights in order to save the country as it is for
the abler types in other sections. All they need is two or three of
the neater virtues, a prayer capacity in faith, a kind and forgiving
heart--and the right look on their faces, effulgent, without being
offensively intelligent. I am not one of these, I weep to confess, but
I have known such women all my life, as one is acquainted with certain
private blessings not shared by the world at large. But I have never
known one of them who did all her own work--a noble service diminishing
to such a woman.

No matter how correct the pattern of her frock is, or how good her
manners are, or how sensible her conversation is, I have never been
in the company of one who performed these tasks without becoming
immediately aware of the fact, a sort of uneasiness, as if her shoe was
pinching her foot. Her seams are too straight. Her draperies do not
flow, however voluminous they are. Her eye has a measuring gaze. She
feels like the two-edged sword of a just woman made perfect regarding
me. Or at the very moment when I am about to confer the bright splash
of a thought upon her, my light is put out by the realization that her
mind has skipped back home to make sure she did not leave the top off
the soda jar and did lock the kitchen door.

I am not complaining of her, you understand; I am endeavoring to
compliment her upon her merits. She has all the virtues and you have
only your grace in words, a fluttering heart and a mind that climbs her
like a clinging vine in conversation. You must lean to her because she
will not bend to you. She has lost some graceful elasticity of the
spirit. You cannot clasp fingers with one of her thoughts and fly up on
an idea and share opinions with her. She is pickling her opinions. You
can frequently smell the vinegar of her mind boiling. At such moments
I have become so enfeebled spiritually as to be momentarily deprived
of my soul. I am of the earth earthy, due entirely, I suppose, to the
effect her obvious worth has upon my stricken conscience.

But I am not alone in these sensations, only more vocative about them.
I have observed her carefully; she is widely depressing.

I have known such a woman to go abroad, spend a year studying art
in all the galleries of Europe, come home, deliver a lecture on the
masterpieces she has seen and fatigue her audience to the brink of
tears. One must be a person in order to entertain other persons, and
she had lost that touch of Nature which makes us kin whether we are
kind or not. She is a grammarian of duties, and a recitation of culture
if she invades that field. Nothing illuminating sticks to her, nothing
softening can happen to her mentally.

Some instinct for liberty warned me from the beginning to avoid the
fate of these unfortunate best-of-all women. I have been very busy
for forty years, but in my hardest circuit-rider days I never would
do all of my own work; only so much of it as could not possibly be
avoided. Even then I was careful not to put my whole mind on it. If I
had to wash dishes, I always spat enough wit through the kitchen door
at Lundy, even if he was in the uttermost parts of the parsonage, to
draw his fire and thus divorce my attention from the clatter in the
dish pan. Whatever else happens to me, I will never do my own work.
If it comes to that, I will escape the disaster to my soul by having
no works. Dishes and laundry are not mentioned in the Scriptures,
therefore they are not obligatory. I will let my faith praise me rather
than my doughnuts.

In recording this scandalous moral limitation I am simply exposing
to view the kind of mind I have, knowing well how many better women
will take a shot at it. Let them bang away. I would rather have
my reputation as a domestic animal riddled than to have my dearer
faculties destroyed by a flatiron or dishwater. No one was ever more
reduced in poverty than I have been, not one a more considerate
or obedient wife. But I managed to remain a wife, never the mere
servant of my husband. If you must do it, make the business brief and
forgetful. Give him a balanced ration and leave every man to iron his
own shirt, would be my motto, even if I went to the field with him
afterwards and ploughed a furrow by way of reciprocity. The idea is to
keep in with your husband at whatever cost. It works out better in the
long run than making a pig of him at the table and a tyrant of him in
the house.

The disposition to do that is a senseless weakness in devoted women.
Added to their domestic pride, it accounts for the enormous labor now
necessary in the conducting of a home and the entertainment of guests.

I am writing this record, however, to prove that the keeping of virtues
and those attributes becoming to what you think is your nobler nature
is an expensive business, and places you within grasping range of
everybody doing business with you who has no such vainglorious sense of
himself to serve.

I have never found that it pays in any worldly sense to be outrageously
and unscrupulously upright in my dealings. The question is whether
the inward foundations one lays that cannot be swept away by earthly
misfortunes make up for the losses one sustains. I do not know. I
sometimes suffer a very strong temptation to take an inferior’s
under-hold upon a person who thinks I am an easy mark and pull off the
deal according to his standards in business, not mine, just to learn
how it feels to win that way. This, however, is a puerile temptation.
My habits are established. I have no practice in shrewdness; only
cunning enough not to experiment with my too-long-buried talent.




XXXI

YOU MAKE YOURSELF


The forces that create us pass away, whether they are parents,
teachers, or books, and we are left at last to re-create ourselves in
the image of our own minds. This was what happened to me after the
death of my husband. The woman I was and the mind I had then faded
into a sort of peaceful silence. I was not for a long time. I remember
feeling strangely like a ghost, surrounded by the same friends, in the
midst of familiar scenes, but not of them, removed by death as far,
maybe, as he was from the mind and life I had with him. He had been my
altar and my church, I discovered.

From that day forth I escaped from the meekness of being merely a
Methodist. I was Hagar going off into the wilderness with my own Bible,
leaving behind me forever the Abraham and Rebecca brethren and sisters
of the established order. I was in danger of raising up the very
Ishmael of a mind against them. But this passed. By nature I am short
on vindictiveness. I am not even respectable at this point. I have
known myself to relax and forgive people whom I doubt if the Lord will
ever forgive. They seem to pass out of my thoughts like shadows that
obscure the light.

This happened later. Directly after Lundy’s death I was a very
dangerous person, quite mad with the pain and horror of what had
happened to him.

I have a vivid picture of myself at this time one day in my darkened
house. I am sitting outrageously straight, pale and wan in my black
dress, but not bowed down or weeping as a widow should be. And I am
being visited by a great preacher in our church who has come to pray
with me, to the end that I shall find the grace to forgive certain
brethren who used my husband despitefully in his last days. But I
refuse to kneel or to pray or forgive these men. Let God do it, I told
him, since the Lord only knows how and when to pardon us. I left them
terribly in His hands and sat with mine neatly folded, while this
prince of the Church parted his coat tails and fairly shook the shadows
of that sad place with his petition in my behalf. Then he arose, faced
about, and stared at me.

‘Their sins be upon their own heads,’ I retorted, feeling very pale and
weak, but tearless and determined.

I may have referred to this incident in another place, but I am copying
it here to indicate that as soon as that I was stripping my mind of
religious sentimentality and assuming a sensible relation to the Lord,
who believes profoundly in punishing wickedness even if a good man
commits it.

Shortly after this I had an assignment from the editor of ‘The Saturday
Evening Post’ to go abroad and write a series of articles about the
women of the Old World.

I was seriously ill at the time, depleted in mind and body; but I
accepted the commission, as a gambler takes a bet, without giving the
editor the least intimation about my physical condition. You cannot
be overscrupulous in dealing with editors without queering your own
game. Very few of them will arrange with a sick man to do a long piece
of work. My idea is to keep my word with them if I die for it, and
to leave them to take all the other risks. Even at that I have been
obliged to deny myself the vanity of making many contracts with them on
account of knowing that I can write just so many words a day, and that
there are only three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Which is as
much as I am capable of morally in my relations with them.

On my way home, after making this arrangement, it occurred to me that
I would stop over at Dr. Howard Kelly’s hospital in Baltimore and find
out exactly how ill I was; not that this would make any difference in
my plans to go abroad, but I wanted to get some idea of the odds in my
own body against this achievement.

Doctor Kelly was positive that I was in no condition to go. I was a
very sick person. If I persisted in this undertaking, he predicted that
I would be brought home feet foremost, which in my opinion is a very
dull way to arrive.

I sailed two weeks later, stirred around for six months among the women
in the various countries of Europe and wrote my impressions of them.
Those articles would read now as old daguerreotypes look of a far
former generation. Some of the great ones whom I met then are dead,
like Frau Cower of Berlin. I doubt if she would be great now if she
were living. Women have changed the definition of their greatness since
then. She was a neat, dim little old woman with a piece of lace pinned
like a rosette on top of her gray hair. She had a patient, enlightened,
philosophical mind about the future of her country women. The emperor
reviewed his troops that very day in September of 1911, but I do not
suppose Frau Cower had the least inkling of the terrible future already
dawning for German women. My idea of her is that if she had known she
would have skipped the Great War by the length of a century and gone on
with her calculations as if that had been an interruption in destiny.
She had a long-distance mind.

Rosa Goldberg was the most notorious woman in Germany then, but not the
most influential. If there was one with actual influence there at that
time, it was Alice Soloman. I have often wondered what became of her.
She had power and charm, a certain beautiful enthusiasm that made her
effective with men. But Rosa was murdered. This was before the time
when it was conceivable to deal so with even the worst of women in
public life.

Emma Goldman, a far worse woman, was quite the fashion in this country
then. She had her disciples among a certain class of our decadent
intellectuals, to say nothing of the great following in her own class.
I remember her well, slouchily dressed, with a scrubwoman’s figure,
black hair, straight and parted in the middle, black eyes, large and
strong, that missed focusing on other women’s faces. Olive skin,
flushed, thick, red lips, the lower one loose. She taught dishonor
and deserved death, but worked like an evil worm at the foundation of
our social order for twenty years before she was even banished. Which
always seemed to me a futile sort of gesture, in view of the fact that
immigrants are examined at Ellis Island for physical disorders and are
rejected on account of having a pimple, but are permitted to enter with
the most frightful diseases of the mind.

The point about this first adventure I made abroad is that I survived
it and came home head foremost in the business of living as usual.

I have survived a number of physicians who predicted my death. It is
not so difficult. You simply make up your mind not to die of your
complaint, however fatal it sounds in the diagnosis, but to live
according to your spirit as much as possible. I am not expecting to
keep up the struggle indefinitely. This body is not so substantial as
it used to be. The dear thing will drop off me some day like a worn-out
garment. But I shall have got the last shred of wear and tear out of
it. And I shall always remember in paradise what a brave chance I had
in it to do and think and go about on my two feet, which in my present
mortal state still seems a safer way of traveling than by wing.

I do not pretend to be a grasping, discriminating student of the Bible.
I have chosen from it what I need, but I cannot even claim to have
read it through consecutively. Many enlightening passages may have
escaped me, but I do not recall the portrait of a single saint with
wings in the Scriptures. Elijah disappeared in a chariot of fire. Moses
died like a disappointed man. When they reappeared in that cloud of
witnesses, it was a cloud; nothing recorded of their wings. After Jesus
was transfigured, He ascended into heaven. No need of wings.

I think it is probably the mortal imaginations of our preachers and
artists have added this doctrine of wings to saints, because they
felt obliged to illustrate by the familiar symbol of feathers the
_modus vivendi_ of immortality to mortal minds. On the contrary, the
one authoritative description of how we rise from the dust discreetly
records that our corruption puts on incorruption and this body shall
be raised a spiritual body. Only angels, those earlier messengers sent
to men, are recorded as having wings. I do not suppose these beings
ever were in the flesh. I doubt if they are of the same stuff we shall
be. It would not surprise me if they turned out to be the mere birds
of heaven, and that the saints will be stepping around as usual, very
light on their feet, maybe, but wingless.

I do not recommend this idea to others, but to me it is comforting. I
have always felt the need of having something firm to rest upon, even
when I tuck the head of my spirit beneath the wings of my imagination
and pass into a heavenly reverie. I am psychologically opposed to being
up in the mere air, here or hereafter.

The minds we have make slaves of us. We build a city or take one.
We make laws, establish our institutions and our covetousness in
commerce. We call this a civilization; but it is nothing, no more than
the dream of a transient world that never stands the tests of the great
realities which remain unshaken in us beyond all our knowledge and
powers assumed. It is invariably destroyed, blown away before the wind
of some change in our minds. And we lie at last buried deep in the dust
of our endeavors. But nothing sleeps in the dust. It must rise and live
again. So do we come up from the dark wilderness of these disorders and
start all over again after the pattern of our own minds. Another dream,
in which men walk like somnambulists for centuries to the same doom
of death and dust regardless of God, even when we call it a Christian
civilization, missing the way, the truth, and the life as we did before.

The importance we attach to the workings of the merely mortal mind
seems to me to approach madness. If for one moment we could escape
from the illusion created by our own faculties, we should perceive
that we make of ourselves the fools of all creation. The sense to live
is the only wit that really counts, and we have less of that than any
other creature. We have only the sense to overcome, achieve, and to
destroy. A flea knows where to hop, but we do not know. A dog knows the
way home, but the smarter a man is the more likely he is to lose his
way home. He can only think, believe, hope; but he does not know the
simplest things that the beasts of the field never have to learn. He
will drink from a pool that a thirsty ass will pass by because the ass
knows the water is polluted.

The very earth has more sense than we ever show. It is not inanimate,
but contains and uses all the elements we call brains without having
them incased as ours are in a small bone shell. The life that springs
green and silent from its breast is more obedient to law than we are,
and survives us. It knows a joy and peace in living that we never
learn. We are foolish to think the trees are not wise because they do
not speak.

I have long suspected that the power of speech is not a power at all,
but a mere form of hysteria from which the living that really know the
truth never suffer because they do not fear life or death as we do and
can afford to be calm and silent. The frailest flower that blooms knows
that it will rise from the dead in the next season’s sun, breathe,
feel again the dew and rain. Therefore these little ones make no such
tragedy as we do of death. Their knowledge is better than our faith
in immortality. We make a religion and an anguish of doubts about an
incident which all Nature, every Scripture, and our own instincts prove
is a senseless anxiety. We do live again in the spirit if the very dust
rises again in myriad forms of beauty and strength.

But no scientist would offer such evidence. He must think it out,
when this is something which cannot be thought, but must be accepted
as we take our breath from the air without arguing about it. And the
very theologians will throw up their hands in pious horror at such an
idea, give it a bad name like pantheism, as if this was the name of a
peculiarly damnable heresy.

My notion is that it is not our heresies but our sins that damn us, and
no Christian name we apply to them will save us. I am no pantheist;
I am one of those humbler, more transient manifestations of the will
of God. The grass outlives me, the rose outblooms in blossoms that
praise Him better than mortal deeds, and I know the stars outshine me,
no matter how immortal I am. As a spirit clothed in celestial light,
I doubt if I should amount to more than one short beam in a universe
filled with the brilliance of His glory.

To me, it appears sillily egotistical to give ourselves such airs
about being immortal. Everything else is. The very stones are fertile
and furnish elements indispensable to life. We, indeed, are the only
created forms of life that entertain trembling, despairing doubts about
that. We are even stupid and narrow-minded when our lid comes off
and we go insane. We stick to the beaten tracks of the mortal mind,
no real imagination in our delusions. The asylums are filled with
men and women who believe themselves to be kings and queens or some
other great mortals. I have never heard of one who imagined himself a
disembodied spirit. The nearest they ever come to that is by claiming
to be disastrous prophets. I have never heard of one who had the glory
of madness to believe himself a majestic oak or even a blade of grass.
The nearest approach I recall was the poor young lunatic who thought he
was a grain of corn and invariably took to his heels at the sight of a
chicken. We show too many evidences of ignominy to give ourselves airs,
sane or insane.

If I should take leave of my senses while I am still in the flesh--for
I do not expect to need such senses when I am finally in the spirit,
any more than flowers take thought to bloom--I hope I shall swing out
into a more becoming conceit than the notion that I am an article of
diet suitable for a hen, or even the Queen of Sheba. I have my doubts
about whether she was all she should have been, or she could not
have been traipsing after a man with Solomon’s notorious reputation.
My vanity would be better served with the delusion of being an
ever-blooming rose. As it is, I suffer sometimes from the vague regret
that I missed blooming at the right time, the weather of my years being
inclement then and unsuited to mere happiness.

But this record will prove that I had my delusions along with the rest
of my kind, and that though time and experience destroy the dearest
illusions, we do cling to the last to whatever delusion we adopt. It
is a bondage of the mind which we work up and strengthen year by year
until nothing remains but a terrible obedience.

What amazes me now is the shrewdness with which I avoided various forms
of bondage by which women are so frequently defeated in their pursuit
of happiness.




XXXII

THE LADY POLITICIAN


Without taking thought I have avoided the conscience of the modern
woman, which is a very sensitive, diligent, and unhappy conscience. I
seem to have lost step with my sex. No one honors more than I do the
sincerity of their purpose to reform, improve, and save the world.
But I mistrust their judgment. I particularly mistrust their power to
achieve their own wills. We have always been dominated in mind and
conduct by men. We have never been free moral agents, nor even immoral
ones. Cast your eye about and you will always see the string some man
pulls to move the puppet we are.

However it may appear to others I do not know, but to me women seem
to be more completely under the dominion of men than ever before.
The difference is that formerly we were managed or mismanaged by our
husbands and fathers; now it takes a whole political party to turn us
about and use us for their honor and glory; but they do it. If any one
calls attention to the amendments and laws we have been instrumental in
getting on the statute books, I call your attention to the fact that
the state of the individual woman is not changed. The wife signs away
her property as usual if the husband needs it. The mothers have less
influence than ever before upon the character and conduct of their
sons. The only political influence they have is by adding themselves
obediently in subordinate positions to the great political parties.
Never were there so many handmaidens to politicians in this world. It
is a less elevating service than being a down-trodden ‘widow indeed’
who was required to wash the feet of saints--presumably male saints.
They are now atoms of public life, but men control public opinion. So
watch the atoms spin.

The trouble is we can pass no amendment to the Constitution that will
change our own nature.

How well I understand the predicament of that young woman delegate to
the Democratic convention recently held in New York!

No one will deny the frequent assertion made through the press that
the women delegates in this convention were an admirable body of
women, but those who are most familiar with the attributes of what men
call admirable women will have their very grave doubts about whether
they had any more to do than they were told with the final choice and
nomination of John W. Davis as our presidential candidate, which was
the very creditable performance of what appeared at one time to be a
convention decidedly discreditable to the great party it represented.

If the women in it had been equal to the emergency, they might at
least have insisted upon a physical examination of the contending
candidates. This would have eliminated some of the contestants quietly
and decently, as we bury the dead, without so much scandal and with
less than half the expense incurred in getting rid of them. Right now
we do not know whether the livers and kidneys of Coolidge and Davis are
sound. But when we consider the casualties in the White House due to
electing men depleted in health and vitality, this is as important an
issue before a nominating convention as any plank in their respective
platforms. More than half these give way anyhow later on under
pressure. But when the man himself is sickly the chances are ten to one
he will not survive the intolerable burdens he has assumed, and this is
always a national tragedy.

The ineffective person is always the shrewdest critic of those who
strive, however blindly, to achieve. I seem to belong to that class,
but I am so located for the sake of discretion, not for purpose
of criticism. I do a bit of haphazard voting now and then for the
purifying of my purely conventional conscience, much as one recites a
prayer without believing the Lord hears his petition. I know the cards
have been stacked and the successful candidate for that office has
been predestined. So I never fash myself into a state of enthusiasm or
animosity over an election.

The most significant evidence I have of the political importance of
women is the change in the character of my own mail. Formerly it
consisted entirely of letters from admiring readers or indignant
readers of my books, or from those kind private folk who are one’s
dearest friends, even if one never beholds their faces. They write by
way of clasping hands with you or exchanging confidences with you. But
now if a political campaign opens, I suppose every woman receives as
many letters as if she had written a particularly appealing book. Every
candidate from the coroner type to the more iridescent eloquent type
who wants to be a congressman or senator writes to solicit our votes.

These are remarkably dull letters, couched in the embarrassed
language of an awkward man writing to a respectable woman, whom he
really does not like, inviting her to vote for him. To me it seems a
frightful waste of postage, especially when the thing bears a picture
of the aspiring author. Yesterday I had such a letter, ornamented
with the printed likeness of one who is running for the office of
health commissioner in this State, a man so grossly fat that he has
practically no lines in his face by which a thought might be expressed.
My idea of a health commissioner would be a lean man with a vital
athletic expression.

But my political psychology may be wrong. It is possible that an obese
commissioner might be moved to preach a healthful gospel of abstinence
and a balanced ration. My impression is that they are all glittering
generalities so far as the health of the people is concerned, and that
the lady demonstrators who travel like missionaries through all the
counties teaching girls to can and cook hold the health of the next
generation in their frail but diligent hands. Nobody elects them. They
get appointed by hook or crook and do valiant service.

In short, I have reached the eye-opening age when a personal letter
from the noblest statesman of them could not move me to any real
interest in his fate.

Why should one vote? At the present moment the highest official in
this state is candidate for reëlection without opposition. Personally,
he bears a faintly pathetic resemblance to Lord Byron. And quite the
contrary is true of him. He is not a poet. He is totally lacking in
that quality which inspired Byron, banished, to lead an insurrection in
a foreign country against despotism. And we cannot banish him! I have
understood that he is an eminently respectable family man, which really
contributes little to his eminence as a public servant. He can lead a
prayer meeting accompanied by the amen chorus of the best brethren, but
he cannot lead a people.

The instinct for personal liberty mentioned a while ago has also led
me to avoid participating in the activities so popular and so ably
conducted by the various women’s organizations. Place yourself within
reach of the executive committee of any up-and-doing group of women,
and find out how much time or strength you have left to spend upon
your own affairs! If you are a social climber, they will give you
prominence in exchange for as much faithful service as you are capable
of rendering. If you desire recognition, which is the complimentary
name of publicity, you may have it as a reward for devoting yourself to
some department of public service for the benefit of mankind, or for
children, or for charity.

If by some fluke of circumstance you have earned distinction, they can
use you for the good of half a dozen causes so completely that you will
never have another half hour to devote to your own cause. Henceforth
you will be identified with their achievements. You will not have
one laurel left on your brow which does not belong to womanhood at
large. If you belong to that ever-increasing volume of women who crave
self-expression, they can provide more ways for you to express yourself
than if you were a mere Christian wife and the mother of ten children.
They are using up more wasted feminine energy than any other power
company known to civilization.




XXXIII

LIVING IN A BOOK


If you have lived in one house all your life, it becomes so familiar
to you that you do not think of its corners and angles, how the light
comes and the shadows fall through the windows. You do not remember its
upper chamber, because you are living in that chamber, nor that quiet
inner room where you sometimes go to pray, because you are still going
in there, closing the door and falling upon your knees when times are
hard in your spirit, and asking for a little comfort. But some day when
the door is shut and you are left outside, carried away by some wind
of destiny, bereaved of these intimate associations with it, then you
remember all the inside of that house, every board in the walls, where
you slept and where you worked, the place you used to sit with folded
hands when the day’s work was done.

So it has been with me about the Bible. As long as Lundy lived we were
in it. It seems to me I was always traveling its pages back and forth
from the old dispensation to the new dispensation, from one Gospel to
another Gospel, wandering around in Revelation as one walks upon the
shores of a strange land, mystified.

In those days it never occurred to me to quote the Scriptures. I left
Lundy to do that. I was not even aware of being word-perfect in them.
But after his death they came back to me, and I had the use of them as
if they belonged to me at last according to my own mind. I recall them
by my association with him. I use them right and left as he never would
have dared to use them. The little kind ones are like bright footpaths
that lead now more particularly to my own God, which I used to travel
with him in the shadows. The great ones stretch away before and after
me beyond the limits of time and sense. I do not try to reduce them to
the dimensions of my own thoughts; I simply spread myself in them and
feel immortality eased in all this space.

When you have only one book you use it a great deal. I have read
many books, but I never had my own personal rights to but one, the
Bible. The others belong to the authors who wrote them. They have been
created, but, broadly speaking, they are not creative. The Bible is. I
may be pardoned then for referring to it frequently as the source from
which I have received most of my inspiration in living and thinking.

Now it is a mistake to fit your life to one or two Scriptures
when there is such a wide choice of them. So when these moods of
godly depression fall upon me and I am feeling like a poor old
How-Firm-a-Foundation, or like a spiritual leaf that has been used a
long time for the fattening or healing of the ungodly, I stir about in
the Gospels for a better prophecy of myself. Something like this, for
example: ‘And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water,
that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not
wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.’

Nothing is changed, you understand; the same law of the spiritual
world is demanding the laying down of my life for His sake; but I get
an extension of that law for my own mortal sake. Somewhere, sometime
I shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, and whatsoever
I do shall prosper! I am not above making a literal interpretation
of such a promise in the fairing weather of my mind. I begin to feel
greener, fresher in my boughs. Suddenly I am conscious of many rivers
of kind water that have flowed close to the roots of my life. I have
sinned quite a good deal and come short of my own glories, much less
the Lord’s glory. Still I have not lost much, only a few of my dearer
treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. I am very
well off here. After all, for a bush of my size I have brought forth
considerable fruit. I am not old; I feel everlasting. Therefore let the
years come; time cannot defeat or harm me.

In such a mood I can swing paragraphs by the hour from the tip of my
pen, or I can go forth and plant a field, strutting in the conviction
that whatsoever I do shall prosper. It is a grand feeling, kin to
that liberty the old-fashioned preachers used to claim when they made
sure the Holy Ghost had descended upon them and they fell upon their
congregations with power.

It all comes to this again and again when you get the chance to see
through your glass clearly for a moment: The Scriptures were made for
us. They are the literature of what we are, the great reference book
of man. We are not created like victims to fulfill them. By living
we do fulfill them, no matter how we live, in the flesh or in the
spirit, or, like the mortal hyphens we really are, halfway between.
I use my Scriptures this way, regardless of what may happen to the
favorite creeds and doctrines of other people. The idea of a church
God or a national God is too diffused to meet my personal needs and
peculiarities.

I believe this is true of every man.

I cannot tell now how I missed even the faintest association with the
Scriptures in the minds of the people who knew me best. Maybe it was
because I was never prominent in church work; maybe it was because
after the shadows fell upon me and I had premonitions of Lundy’s fate
I did not ask the prayers of all Christian people, nor take even one
saint into my confidence lest he should suffer by this betrayal. In any
case, after he was gone, and I stepped forth in my own written word
caparisoned in so many of his favorite passages from the Bible, some
of these people were scandalized as if a light and humorous person
masqueraded in sacred garments. My own church regarded me askance for a
long time. I was never offended. On the contrary, I comprehended their
anxiety with a sort of sympathy.

Comparatively few people inherit the Scriptures; they get them as
we Protestants accuse the Catholics of getting theirs--predigested,
interpreted, laid down for them in creeds and doctrines. My poor
brethren could not be sure that I would not presently rise up in
the insolence of my own mortal mind and deny the divinity of Jesus
Christ or commit some other damnable heresy. This is frequently the
way with those who interpret the word for themselves. They want to
square it with some half-developed science which will be changed or
refuted to-morrow, or they go off on a purely intellectual tangent.
As a spiritually endowed person I have always had the sense to look
down upon our finite reasoning powers and to despise my intellectual
tangents.

I have discovered, however, that in dealing with Christians of whatever
denomination it is discreet and valorous to use my mortal wits as
shrewdly as if I dealt with the impious. They may not be subject to
the same vices, but they have a record as long as the history of man
for persecution. That is still an active principle of the religious
conscience. I had my doubts about whether a mere woman would be
considered eligible to a church trial for heresy, not having heard
of one in my times who had suffered this distinction. Still, it was
just as well to settle down somewhere beyond the reach of this honor.
So, long since, I have allowed my membership to lapse. Not even a
presiding elder can summon me before a quarterly conference to be
tried either for my sins or my views concerning this or that doctrine.
I am a Methodist unconfined, outside in the Lord’s pasture at large.
If my church puts on a million-dollar drive for funds, I dutifully
give my widow’s mite and spend my real Christian charity on a family
of Hardshell Baptists who are in graver need of help than a rich and
prosperous church.

When the Southern Methodist Church unites with the Northern branch of
this same denomination, as now seems imminent, I contemplate reducing
the widow’s mite of my contribution. As the devoted bystander of the
Southern Methodist Church, I am opposed to this Union; not on account
of prejudices connected with the reconstruction period, when we escaped
their maudlin sentimentality concerning the negroes by withdrawing from
them. I merely remember that as a warning, but my real objection is
that we can be better brethren in Christ further apart.




XXXIV

HAPPINESS


The trouble is that we can use the Scriptures only as far as they will
go, and those we have do not seem to be complete. I have a vague hungry
feeling that we have not discovered all of them. There must be a few
tablets still buried somewhere thousands of years deep in brighter dust
which record a little happiness, something to ease the strain of so
many sacrifices and holy joys. I have had such joys. It is like coming
up through great tribulations and sitting for a moment beneath your
halo with tears on your cheeks. I am not complaining, you understand;
it is a grand feeling, but too poignant to be really restful, as if you
had been exalted by a deed or a sacrifice and must choose just holiness
when you are still in the flesh and feel the mortal need of relaxing
some.

I know by the witness of my own spirit that we have missed a Gospel
or two which contained the strictly human touch in words. Paul comes
somewhere near it in his tender letters to Timothy, but all these
apostles were made too grave by their suffering to catch the light of
that message we should have. The place where it really belongs is in
those passages quoted from Jesus. I am certain they failed to record
all he said, or that it has been lost, or that it is still hidden
away in the archives of time. He was fearless, merciful, so good at
remembering that we are dust, he would have made a little allowance
for that kind of happiness humans need; not an indulgence in sin, but
an indulgence in life.

I do hope it is not blasphemous to say that I can almost see Jesus in
such a mood; His people at ease about Him. It would be a quiet, bright
morning before the multitudes began to gather. And He will have looked
at these chosen to keep and defend the Word with that blessing look
even we can bestow upon children whom we love. And He will have said,
‘Little children, be happy!’ Something like that He must have said,
knowing what travails they were to pass through and how greatly they
would need the respite of light-heartedness. But nothing of the kind is
recorded anywhere in the Bible.

The word ‘happy’ does occur at rare intervals, but it is too fearfully
qualified. ‘Happy is the man that feareth alway,’ says Solomon. And
Job in great pain catches his breath with this: ‘Happy is the man whom
God correcteth.’ And James says, ‘We count them happy which endure.’
All of which means, fortunate are they who are prepared for the worst,
take their punishments with meekness, and endure with courage. These
are the evidences of a good character and a noble mind, but not my idea
of real happiness. One wearies of worrying all the time with his best
attributes, especially in plain sight of the wicked, who do seem to
flourish without any such attributes. I have never taken this as hard
as Jeremiah did; still, I have had my feelings.

One day Jeremiah’s virtues irked him. He was too aloof and lonesome.
And he had what you may call an altercation with the Lord:

‘Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk
with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked
prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?
Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: they grow, yea, they
bring forth fruit: thou art near in their mouth, and far from their
reins.’

He goes on reminding the Lord of his own obedience and how he has borne
his trials until his sense of outraged justice gets the better of him,
and he exclaims, ‘Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and
prepare them for the day of slaughter.’

I do not suppose the very treacherous are happy and I have never wanted
the wicked pulled out like sheep for the slaughter, but I have always
wanted to ask a truly bad man who seemed to be having a good time if he
really was enjoying himself.

I have always had a hankering after some cheerful salvation, suitable
and sanctifying to me as a human being in this present world, where
I know what I am doing and what I want. I feel that I have a buried
talent for just happiness, a sort of incandescence of my own nature
which longs to shine. It seems to me that I have never made my happy
sounds in living. I have missed that laughter which is the speech of
a merry heart. But I have heard it many a time in a crowd and always
flirted my head around to see who made it. Usually a young person whose
burdens are still being borne by others.

But once, I remember, it was an old woman standing in her own dooryard
watching two children, serious and absorbed in their play. Such a
figure! Tall and gaunt, so straight and finely posed, her homely dress
might have been a rag flung over an imperishable ideal. Such a face!
Wrinkled, brown, rough, like a crude verse written by somebody like
Ossian; the wind and the weather of life had passed over it, but now
the sun in her eyes, the simplicity of the deepest wisdom made humorous
upon her smiling lips. No comeliness anywhere, but that beauty of
honest happiness in every line. I think of her as a song I saw once in
the flesh set to a good stout tune of laughter.

I have a distinct recollection of such people through the whole of
my life. They do exist--women who have survived all their fears and
learned their burdens by heart and stand canonized by that undefeated
look of happiness. I have seen someone go by who looked like a joyful
traveler on his way to some happiness he had earned, carrying himself,
you may say, with the long light stride of a good conscience. At such
times I have felt the light of my wings as if I had seen the witness of
my own hopes go by.

These are the only people I have ever envied. They have an expression
of animation not intellectual, but vital, so different from that
conquered look of peace which I am always fearing will settle upon my
face before I know what they have learned, not by thinking, but by some
happier use they have made of living.

I cannot now recall when this idea first took possession of me, but it
was far back in the years--that the life I was living was not mine,
but a sentence imposed upon me by fate, to be served faithfully. And
then as a reward further on I should have my very own life, which would
be different. I was not so concerned as my husband to win heaven. I
had an impression then which has persisted with me to this day, that
for all we know this life may be a rest the Lord gives us between
long spells of eternity. I anticipated some place in my years where
happiness would begin, as tired people look forward to a vacation.

Shortly after ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife’ was published, it seemed to me I
saw it, as you look a long way down the road and see a wider brighter
place where you turn in through a gate and enter your own house. I
remember saying something to Lundy about this. We would get away
presently from all the cares we had ever had, take a little house in
the country and begin to live happy ever after. I remember his silence,
the look he gave me. If in the last day when we are called there is one
who hears, but cannot rise from his dust, he will have just that look
of terrible comprehension.

It comforts me now to remember that not even in this dark time when the
shades were deepening about him did I ever raise my hands to heaven and
cry, ‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ I think well
of myself that my one concern was to keep him and comfort him as long
as I could reach him. Maybe I shall never achieve happiness, but one
thing I have had--the terrible wisdom of love. I cannot doubt that I
have received the best of my life and nearly every gift that prospered
in me from my association with Lundy. What really troubles me sometimes
is whether or not he might have fared better in the spirit if he had
been free as a monk to seek his sacrifices and renunciations.

I think now happiness is a thing you practice like music until you have
skill in striking the right notes on time. We have no vocation for it.
And I had no practice, not a day when I was free from care and one
great anxiety--and one must be free to be happy. I know that much about
it by having missed it.

I came nearer to what happiness must be, a sort of deliverance from
the things that are, after I began to do creative work. Once I had a
pen in my hand and the use of my faculties, the casements of all my
darkness were flung wide and I escaped into a very bright, quiet, good
world of thoughts. Every memory from my earliest childhood came back to
me, luminous substances to be worked into words. It was like weaving
love and deeds and the beautiful colors of every sensation upon the
loom of my mind. What I accomplished was as nothing to the visions I
had. If, as Matthew Arnold claimed, genius consists in the power to
recall, I may lay some claim to having genius. In one small room all my
lights and darkness came; people that I had seen, but never knew, were
suddenly revealed to me, so that I could write down the very secrets of
their hearts. Men and women, long since dead, lived again and waited
there close as life to be used in case I needed them for a paragraph
or two. Things that Lundy had said, poetry and philosophy that he had
read to me, piled up like notes on my desk, changed, you understand, by
the alchemy of my own mind, but still the parents of my thoughts. When
I think of the vast stores of material I have had, the wonder and grief
to me is that I have made such a dim and poor use of them.

Once you get away from the Word, any discussion of religion is
unprofitable and apt to become acrimonious. For this last page or two
I have felt my own spiritual gorge rising, a mean and distasteful
sensation which has no place in this record. It is better to go back to
my original speculations on happiness.

This is not a thing to tell, for it concerns the more intimate annals
of my mind and is set down here with the same apology one should make
for shouting in public when in an exalted spiritual mood. But here it
is. Many a time when I have filched a grand thought or some finer truth
out of life to write down, I am too moved to do it. I get up and pace
the floor. I cast a thankful look through the ceiling at my heavenly
Father, or I rush bareheaded out of doors in the bleakest weather to
cool off this happiness, so that presently I may return and copy it
into words.

If this is happiness, I have had it; but my suspicion is that I may
have experienced then only the pangs of a great joy. It is not a thing
achieved by inspiration, even if you write an epic or paint a noble
picture. You have produced something. My idea of happiness is something
you get. It is intaking, not creative. You cannot think it. It comes
to you in the reality of personal experience, selfish and satisfying.
What I want to know is how I have missed it. Is it by some infernally
digestive attitude of my mind toward common human experience which
consumes my illusions, or is it on account of circumstances over which
I have no control, or have I just led myself like a wanderer walking in
a blind circle between two worlds?




XXXV

THE LATTER DAYS


I have often wondered what becomes of us here in this life. For what
we were in the beginning does pass away, and we become the millstone
around our own neck. No matter how good we try to be or how bad we
actually are, we barely keep up appearances. It is not time that
changes us, but our own desires, ambitions and the fierce struggle
we make to get what we want. The body breaks under the strain, our
faculties begin to wabble like shooting stars, even if they leave a
trail of light behind them. We lose our grip, let go and stand aside,
but not satisfied. No matter how wise we have been, we grow simple. No
matter how rich, we become mendicants searching the faces of youth for
a little praise or recognition, ready to accept any flattery, however
obvious, disposed to keep our noses and let out that long plaint of
weariness and disillusionment peculiar to our condition.

Many years ago there was a distinguished Methodist preacher in
Tennessee. He rose so high in the ranks of his brethren that we called
him a divine, and he had some kind of double-D title conferred upon
him. He was a good man and did valiant service for his Lord and for the
Church. At last his strength began to fail. Some power of the Presence
went out of him as it always does when the magnetism of personality
dies down in a preacher. His sermons lengthened intolerably, which
is the final symptom a minister in our Church shows before the bishop
and presiding elders superannuate him. No congregation wants the Word
drooled to it even by a saint. So this old man was retired on his
niggardly little pension and went to live with his married daughter.

One day I met him on the street, pushing a baby carriage with his
youngest grandchild in it. He wore his pastoral clothes, stiff collar,
and white bow tie. His linen was as white as the apron of a neat
nursemaid. But what a look in his eye, an expression of tears! Isaiah
demoted! Nothing humanly unkind had happened to him. His daughter had
probably taken this method of airing the baby and getting her father to
take exercise at the same time. But when you have preached salvation
with power from the pulpit for fifty years, it is worse than a fall
from grace to be reduced to pushing a baby carriage.

I halted to wish him good-morning and to admire the baby. He did not
care much for this morning, and let the baby go for a moment; he wished
to say something to me.

‘If you knew what old age really is, you would pray for death while you
are young!’ he quavered.

I tried to comfort him, but he was too terribly wise to be comforted.

‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I am not supposed to be of sound mind. So they
give me little tasks like this to keep me occupied,’ regarding the
infant ruefully.

‘When you have been ordained and preached the gospel for many years,
and moved men by the spirit, it’s a terrible experience to be set aside
as of no further consequence. I may act a little queer; you do when
misfortune and defeat overtake you in your old age. But if I behaved
as senselessly as a lot of young men do, I’d be hailed before a lunacy
commission!’

And this was twenty years ago, when nobody thought of summoning an
alienist to determine the mental responsibility of a youth who had run
amuck and committed a crime.

As I grow older and feel the changes that wisdom and experience make in
me, and learn to sit down more to husband my failing strength and to
keep silent longer when younger people are exploiting the foolishness
of their wits, I often think of that old man toddling feebly behind
the baby carriage, shorn of all his earthly glories save the insignia
of his long pastoral coat tails, despised because his mind had passed
the spring and summer seasons of animal wit and aggressiveness, but
pathetically wise.

I am determined to avoid his fate by taking thought now while my will
is strong, and I have fairly good business sense, and still reign
supreme in my own estimation to be spoofed or cajoled by the flattery
of being merely humored. I am already old enough to fix a measuring
eye upon any younger person who undertakes to pacify me with the mere
assurance that such-and-such a thing is all right; nothing is going to
break; everything is greased and the clutch is working properly. I have
known myself to get out of the car and find something wrong and ready
to break, and much of it not greased, and the clutch needing to be
relined.

This sort of enterprise does not enhance your reputation for sweetness
and light among young people, but we must simply keep up our courage
and stand the gaff. If you are a woman, and have passed the age
of control by your merely feminine charms, the only thing left is
to exercise sufficient authority to put the fear of God in these
youngsters and sit tight. My grandfather was not so far wrong when he
was dying and ordered us who were about to supersede him in living out
of the room! That was the last act of authority performed by a gallant
gentleman who showed a proper contempt for sniveling youth.

I do not know how it happens, but as we grow older our friends and
relatives become miraculously younger. We seem to survive too many of
those companions with whom we started in life and passed our achieving
years. As our infirmities increase, they wax stronger, and we become
no more than a memory sitting in the chimney corner. However generous
and considerate they are of your feeling and comfort, you have lost
your standing among them. The consequences are inevitable. You cannot
hold your hand with them. With the best intentions, they are ready to
take up your burdens and manage your affairs, which is really a tender
way of taking your life away from you and leaving you in your old age
without the means of supporting your own vanities and self-respect.

Never again can you show how much better judgment you have than they
have in matters of management and economy! You may be permitted to hold
your dear old yellow deeds, though frequently in a weary moment you
also surrender them; but they have come into real possession of your
property and they are inclined to use it recklessly, according to this
speeding, spending new world they are making for themselves, while you
become the helpless pensioner upon your own hard-earned bounties.

Nothing like that shall happen to me. I have observed young people very
carefully. They are really the pensioners upon our wisdom and reared
upon our earnings. If every man and woman past sixty should suddenly
die, there would be one grand wake of a funeral, then this world would
rock upon its foundations and go to pieces. I give youth thirty days to
destroy the whole thing. What I mean is that we are very important the
older we grow, and for conscience’ sake should endeavor to live as long
as possible in full possession of our powers and affairs.

I have sometimes considered passing my last days writing a book of
gospels for the aged, designed to stimulate their courage and sense of
self-importance. I have observed that we begin to lose them when we
lose the purely physical attributes of strength and animation. This
is that period when the mind clears and can be used most effectively
according wisdom and experience, instead of those emotions which
inevitably affect our actions and judgments during our younger years.

The time comes when these friends and these relatives who have grown
up long after we grew up will gather around you out of respect,
affection, and politeness; but you are a short circuit. There will be
such a divergence in your point of view from their points of view that
no common ground of conversation or comradeship remains. They will be
sitting up with you off and on in this manner as if you were the dear
dead body of an ancestor, although you may be getting your breath as
usual and looking straight through those innocent young things, too
polite to read aloud what you see going on inside of them.

The thing to do then is not to retire to your own room like a sundown
old cat, or like a pathetically forgiving old woman, but to exile
them. Send them back to sink or swim in the world they have made for
themselves, and keep yours. Live and die under your own roof, even if
you do it alone. I have a suspicion that it is a lonely passage, even
if everybody is present.

I willed the world to these young powers and princes ten years ago
when I came to this valley. They can have it. I am willing any time to
spare them a few words of advice about how to conduct it, and I like to
step around in it once in so often to see how things are going. But I
reserve this small one, laid off like a garden between these hills and
fitted to me as a fine old tune is fitted to the simple words of a good
old hymn.

Once you begin to fumble according to your own light with a
denominational idea of God or to mix politics with your religion, your
light goes out and you find yourself being tried for heresy or in some
brotherhood which denies the divinity of Jesus, whereas if you had your
own right mind toward the Lord you would know that any brotherhood
which denies Jesus is apt to be a vindictive corporation organized
against all men who do not belong to that union. We are not brothers
except according to the way and the life of the great Galilean. I
myself cannot pretend to be more than the disgusted stepbrother of all
modernists in the Church and of red radicals in general.

But after all we spend most of our centuries maneuvering in the right
direction. It is only now and then that a demoniacal cat-fit starts
somewhere, as in Russia at the present time. The hysteria spreads as
demoniacal dancing did in the middle centuries, but it dies down. The
whole thing comes from some monstrous mob ignorance of the spirit. The
individual Russian still believes in his God, but the evil forces of
stronger minds are exploiting him.

The thing that grieves is the casualties among the innocent along the
way.

Here is a poor old bishop who has written a book in which he denies
a personal deity and doubts there ever existed such a historical
character as Jesus Christ. On the cover of his book is the emblem of
Soviet Russia, the hammer and the sickle. Beneath that is the red star,
emblem of the workers’ party in America, and the first sentence of
the book is a quotation from Karl Marx, ‘Religion is the opium of the
people.’ I am touched by that old man’s predicament as I am sometimes
at the sight of an old Confederate soldier who had a brave record, but
who has lost his wits and goes about decorated with cheap pewter and
brass medals; only this poor soul has got them published on the cover
of his book instead of being pinned upon his breast.

I have noticed a certain thing especially about brilliant men. They
retain the use of their faculties long after they lose their judgment.
If one of them remains in business too long after the prime of life, he
is apt to slip up and make an investment which costs him the whole of
a hard-earned fortune. If he is a thinker and an authority upon some
obtuse subject, he is apt to lose his grip, take a header and show up
among the spiritists, as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, who appears
to have retained his thinking powers long after he lost the sense to
use them.

It would not surprise me if H. G. Wells turned out to be a religious
fanatic in his last days. These people suffer some kind of reverse
in mind. They go off on tangents. So this innocent old bishop with
the ascetic countenance and a noble Christian life behind him lost
the rudder of his faculties, and is now being exploited by those arch
madmen, the communists. He has apparently reached the mimetic stage
of senility, got his metaphors mixed, and is trying to impersonate
both the grand old bishop and the grand old communist so magnificently
interpreted in the first chapters of ‘Les Miserables.’

Old men are sometimes subject to great vanities of the soul without
any wisdom. How else does one of them get the idea of calling himself
the Episcopus Bolsheviscum et Infidelium? Instead of being tried
for heresy, he should be rescued, put away in a quiet, comfortable
place and allowed to fan himself out according to his illusions. He
is obviously a good old man who has been tricked and flattered by
designing men and their still more designing propaganda. Somebody
has reversed the lever of his mind, else his training in spiritual
consciousness would have insured him against being upset by discovering
traces of our Scriptures in mythology and every heathen religion and
philosophy. These pagans, the very barbarians and savages, naturally
borrow, plagiarize and take the truth as we do, frequently veiled in
tradition. We all have the same God and must feel the stirrings of
His image in us. If this man had been in his right senses, does any
one believe that the study of astronomy could have possibly upset his
strictly Christian faith? Can what we know or suspect about a purely
physical universe affect the everlasting fact that our spirit does bear
witness to the truth of such Scriptures as the Ten Commandments, the
twenty-third Psalm and the Sermon on the Mount?

Words are dangerous things. They lead to heresy trials now, and they
formerly led many martyrs to the stake. I suppose the good Bishop
still believes in Providence, but here he is in his old age trying to
liquidate his God into natural law. Somebody has stolen that many pages
of his mind or he would know there never was a law without a lawmaker.

‘Banish gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth!’ he cries.

Well, that has been done in Russia. Religion certainly is the opium of
the people there. Never has the world seen such a politically pious
people. They sleep, indeed, but what uneasy slumber is this that
filches all a man has and degrades him by his very sacrifices! Imagine
living under a government which permits its people to prosper for a few
years, in order that it may step in and confiscate their wealth and
thus reduce them once more to the direst poverty of a national ideal
where the only capitalist is this rogue of a government and the only
god is the pickled body of an arch-fiend who even in death imposed his
monstrous will upon them.

My feeling is that every man is entitled to his own God, which is the
same God no man can escape. And heaven deliver me from living in a
country where there are no capitalists! My idea would be to live in
one where everybody would be in neighborly reach of one. But at that I
am this close kin to the bishop in the perversity of my mind; I should
like to see all communists and radicals banished from this country
before they pollute the minds of the ignorant, irresponsible, and
unwary, who are the real poor we have always with us, even if some of
them are learned and rich.

My tides are falling. I have no longer the mortal power to believe
everything and hope everything. I must leave hopes now for those who
need them more than I do.

When you are passing into the afternoon of your years it is wise to
break the habit you used to have of planning for the future, because
your future is behind you, as some Smart Aleck has said. It is
sensible to economize in hopes, because they are depleting when you
no longer have the power to achieve them. I have planted all my trees
years ago. Presently I shall be obliged to sit beneath their shade and
fold my hands. Even then I know I shall not be contented with just
peace. I shall be looking and wishing for a little happiness.

When you are about to matriculate into old age you speculate a good
deal about how you will feel then. I am thinking it would be a grand
thing to live long enough to grow simple and full of faith and the
artless happiness I had as a child. Old people do sometimes; they come
again into that eager, snooping curiosity the very young have. They
go about wondering and getting themselves happily deceived as we keep
terrors and anxieties from little children. It is a sweet and blessed
state.

Heaven preserve me from becoming a grand old woman and being obliged to
keep my dignity and mind sitting up overwhelming others to the last!
I should hate to pass out as one of my grandfathers did. He was very
old, but he retained to the end an outrageously overbearing use of
his faculties. All of us who were his meeker posterity had gathered
respectfully about his bedside, not tearful, because he was intolerant
of tears and we dared not weep. Presently he swept the whole bowed
company with one glittering gray glance and commanded us to leave him
alone.

‘I will not be stared out of countenance at the very last!’ he gasped.

So he died with all of us hidden behind the bed peeping at him.

I want some one to hold my hand then, and to hear many kind voices
soothing me and praising me as if I had been a dear good old child for
a long time. I want to be reduced to that innocency of the ‘such as’
when I go hence, and maybe trailing some fragment of the same cloud of
glory with which I came from God who was my home.




XXXVI

WHY WORSHIP EUROPE?


We never can be sure what it was that gave us a bad cold, and for some
reason we invariably speculate about that as if it made a difference.
So it is with getting to be an old person when we have always felt
young. I suppose we do grow old, but we do not know it until suddenly
the fact comes upon us. The curtain drops behind us, all those years
when we were young pass into memory, and we see the whole of life from
a soberer, wiser, different point of view. Our very self-consciousness
gets a stoop in the shoulders, and though we may go on for a time with
a square-shouldered air we are not the same.

About this time that change took place in me. I shall never know
whether it was the death of my husband, ill-health, or that six months
spent in Europe, but some vivacity of the spirit was gone when I came
home. Life had been bent somewhere within. I felt the weariness of
wisdom, such as one gets from the world. And I never had it until this
time--a curious depression about the mortal fate of man. I was so
outrageously tamed that I lost the habit of making dogmatic statements,
which had always been a refreshing insolence of the mind with me, as
bearing arms must be with a soldier of fortune. It seemed to me that I
had been demoted and suddenly civilized.

Whatever may have been the cause I do not know, but in my opinion it
was Europe, that aged me. It is an old book of history, illustrated
with the scenes and architecture of former, younger, more spirited
races of men. The countries I saw could never have been produced by
the people who are now living in them, with the possible exception of
England. I do not like Britishers, but involuntary respect compels me
to hand it to Englishmen wherever I see them. They have the weakest
chins in the Old World and the strongest wills still to survive and
achieve.

I cannot understand Americans who worship the life, culture, and
mental attitude of these failing civilizations. But they do. Nothing,
not even the Great War and our experiences then with their rapacity
and their resentment of our qualities can cure us of this obsession.
If the League of Nations had been called the League of Arts, nothing
could have kept us out of it. We spend more every year staring at their
scenery, buying their pictures, statues, tapestries, and the very
stones of their ancient castles than would be required to open every
door in the world to our commerce, our inventions, our morals, and our
institutions, all of which are more vigorous and vastly superior to
anything along the same lines in Europe.

But we seem determined to degrade our own powers to achieve better
things by this idealism of old things abroad. We note disparagingly
the imitative characteristics of the negro race in their relation to
the white races, which has in fact delayed the development of their
peculiar genius in many ways; but we show the same tendencies toward
European culture with less excuse. I suppose we buy their old things
because we feel the lack of the tone of time in our civilization and
collect this stuff to produce that effect.

As a matter of fact, there is no virtue in the tone of time. Virtue
comes alone from our own achievements. We cannot mellow what we are by
what we hang on our walls. This is cheating, in my opinion, such as we
do when we chase our ancestors back until we derive a coat of arms from
some old swashbuckling knight of the fourteenth century. Very few of
them would be acceptable now in decent society. It seems to me safer
and more respectable not to admit descending from any further back
than our original pioneer American blacksmith ancestors. This is good
stock, cleaned and charged with the noblest virtues by the courage with
which they endured hardships and built a great civilization. Benjamin
Franklin’s sister made soap and sold it to her patrons in Philadelphia
for a livelihood. It seems to me a more honorable record to hand down
to posterity than that of a seventeenth lady whose only distinction was
that she had a title inherited, not earned, and that she sat to a great
artist for her portrait.

Europe is childish, overbearing, grasping, like an old man. We ought to
contribute liberally to its support on that account, as we do to aged
parents; but we ought not to ape the senility of old age. We do now
limit the quota of immigrants from these countries, but it seems to me
even more important to limit the number of American tourists who go
abroad to the aged and mature. The youth of this country should be kept
at home until their characters and ideals have been firmly established.
I was forty years old before I went over there, confirmed and certified
in my convictions as an American citizen, but it was a long time before
I recovered my own spirit and wiped the shadows of a weaker world from
my mind. Even now I cannot be sure. It seems to me that I detect a
foreign substance at times in my thoughts, not so firm or sound as real
living makes thinking. And I have known a great many people who never
do repent of Europe after they have indulged in it. They get an air of
aloofness and superiority. They are sick and disgusted with our honest
sins. They have acquired a decadent taste for vice as if vice were one
of the arts of Europe, as indeed it is. Now it does seem to me that
if we must be wicked we ought to be normally and healthily wicked and
call our sins by their right names. It is a sign of degeneracy to be so
virtuously sensitive and proud of your vices as so many men and women
of older nations have grown to be.




XXXVII

THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN


A young man with a mind of high degree and an extensive literary style
recently shot off this in a magazine article: ‘Gossips are people
who have only one relative in common, but that relative the highest
possible, namely, God.’ He might have exchanged places with his nouns,
written it: ‘People are gossips who have only one relative in common,’
and hit more nails on the head. But at that, he missed by half the
number we have in common.

The nearest relative of every mortal man that always survives him
is the earth. He is atom and acid kin to it. He springs from it and
returns to it, laid back into it, earth to earth and dust to dust,
which is closer kin at last than he ever was to his up-and-speaking
relatives. He bears but one relation to God, a spiritual resemblance,
either real or fancied. Lacking that, he sustains literally no relation
to God beyond that of mere material scrapped and to be used again for
another form of perishable life, vegetable or flesh. The spirit of him
in this case is a disease to be cured by some divine method with which
no man is acquainted, whatever the theologians may claim to know about
it.

The wisest of us do not actually know much. We can only believe
according to the quality of our minds. The favorite notion used to be
that such spirits went through a severe smelting process, similar
to that of four thousand degrees centigrade by which pure gold is
now extracted from quicksilver, but not, I understand, in paying
quantities. I am merely suggesting this, not as a doctrine, much
less a dogma, but by way of speculating upon the possible method of
purification. Personally, I find it disturbing and unprofitable to
dwell upon the reclaiming processes of damnation. I have seen too many
damned people in this world, and been too frequently damned myself, not
to know that we damn ourselves, and that by an act of will and faith
we can always escape from this sense of guilt, which settles the whole
doctrine of punishment so far as I am concerned.

But the point I wish to make now is that we are all conscious of being
kin to the earth, though comparatively few have more than a creed
sense of being related to God. It is a thing we are taught, but really
learn to feel. The man who begins life next to land never forgets. He
may come up in the world and be carried by his illusions of success
far from its life and loveliness, but there come wearying days in his
countinghouse when his thoughts fly back like homing birds to that
quiet place. His own people may be dead and gone, or he may have lost
the sense of kinship to them; but he remembers still where the shadows
fell upon the grass, as a child far from home remembers his mother’s
face. It is the child in him longing for the comfort of that ancient
mother of all men.

If he has lost out and gone down in the world with a bad conscience,
the same thing happens. There comes a woeful day when his tears rise
like a tide and he knows if he could go back, fling himself beneath the
shade of a certain tree for a long, long time, the silence and goodness
of the earth would cure and restore him. It would not, but this is the
way he feels. The sensation proves and defines the sanctity of our
relation to the earth.

As to those other people, born in cities as chickens are hatched in an
incubator, they have the same instinct changed to silliness. They are
like stepchildren who do not know how to love the earth; still, they
have their transient cravings for its blessings. But few of them can
bear to live with it, because its weather and its silence is terrible
to them. They are really inebriates, living by the intoxication of the
eye and the ear upon the vast confusion of cities and crowds. They may
be strangers there, without home or friends, but they require this
frightful motion and noise as an addict must have his drug. They cannot
bear the solitude of silent places or the diminishing companionship
of their elder brethren, the trees. They are waifs blown like leaves
in the wind the world makes in passing. They never had the capacity
to live, and so substitute motion and noise for life as a sort of
artificial respiration.

I do not know anything more tragic to contemplate than these lost
children of the earth. They may be learned men or successful men; they
may be dutiful or merely beautiful women; but if you dare to realize
how lacking in quality and the original stamina of life they are,
thrust them back upon the earth from which they sprung for longer than
a vacation period, and watch them go to pieces. They are parasites,
consumers. They have lost the valor to produce their own sustenance
from the earth. They survive by trade, commerce, inherited wealth, some
kind of artificial labor. There is not a drop of honest Adam sweat in
them. They are the kind of people who carry an umbrella over their
heads through life, whether it is the roof of an office, a factory or
a stock exchange. They want money, prestige, power, more rights and
privileges than any man can ever earn except at the expense of other
men; but they remain unacquainted to the last with real life achieved
in the open according to the law which bound the first man to the land
for his own good, where there are no fictitious values, but a fair
exchange of bread, poverty, and peace promised to those who do keep and
dress the garden which the earth is.

One may write very convincingly, however, upon this theme without
making much more of a success than Adam did in the beginning when he
was ordained to keep and dress that first garden. The Scriptures are
not easy to fulfil. I have been tempted to doubt if the very apostles
who recorded the Gospels actually lived up to them. I have had a few
divine inspirations myself without feeling the least blasphemous; but
looking back now, I can see no more than the faintest gleam of them in
my deeds. What I mean is that it must be natural, after all, to come
short of the glory of God. This world would be a frightfully glaring
place if we did not.

The queer thing is that we also miss happiness in the effort. The
satisfaction of saints in their piety has always seemed to me
despicable. It is a form of deceit never justified by the facts. And
the gratified airs they give themselves is not to be confounded with
simple honest human happiness. We are entitled to that whether we miss
the glory of God or not. Most of the time I am certain this is the
supreme gift of His love which still awaits us when we comply sensibly
with the conditions; but I have my dark moments when I am tempted to
suspect that this instinct for happiness may be a sort of clucking
encouragement devised by Providence to keep us up and going, as
romantic love is one of Nature’s enchantments to keep up the birth rate.




XXXVIII

GARDEN HAPPINESS


Certainly the exercise of our virtues does not insure happiness.
My experience is according to the Scriptures at this point--your
virtues invite hardship and persecution. I have observed the very good
carefully. They are noble souls, totally defeated in this present world
by their conscience and their sacrifices. It takes a spunky spirit
to escape the Job Scriptures. This is my objection to the intimate
companionship of saints. The last one of them has a martyr tune in him
somewhere, and if you encourage him with either sympathy or admiration,
he will let go and sing it to you in sobbing praise of himself. I
am a trifle that way. More than once I have known myself to keen my
spiritual nose to a kind friend and chant the tale of some injustice
suffered in the exercise of my nobler qualities. It is puerile. No
matter how virtuous you are, virtue goes out of you then.

I take involuntarily a sort of ignoble consolation in the fact that
the very bad are farther from happiness than the very good, because
they have destroyed the foundation upon which happiness must rest. It
is written that if we repent of our sins the Lord remembereth them no
more forever, which is something that cannot be said of any mortal man.
Even if he repents of his transgressions, the memory of them hangs like
a shadow in the light of his spirit forever. I have seen these swords
suspended over the head of a saint until finally he was slain by them.

As for me, I have never been able to keep a record of my virtues,
though I have tried hard enough; but I have never been able to
forget one sin. Just let me get in a weaving way with so much as one
beam of holiness to light my dark places, and some niggardly little
transgression I committed years ago, or yesterday, lifts its head and
licks out a forked tongue in hissing comment. I defy anyone, however
worthy, to risk himself in the glow of holiness without having a
similar experience.

This, I believe, is what is meant by the omniscience of the Almighty.
It is in us, a fearful faculty for seeing ourselves which we cannot
escape. And it reveals each man to himself as a spiritual bungler every
time he frisks within range of his own inner vision. The effect is
salutary, but very depressing. I am never peaceful, much less happy
afterwards.

It all comes to this: We get wisdom of one sort and another with fatal
facility, because the world is full of it, a brilliant or dull sort of
ignorance deduced from observation, study, experience, and the prideful
exercise of our rational faculties; but we are perpetually short on
understanding until after it is too late.

When I came back to these hills to dress my garden in the year 1913,
I know now that I missed happiness by the narrowest margin. I was on
the right track. I was at home again upon the earth. I felt that peace
and steadiness of mind we all feel in familiar surroundings among
companions who never change or move away. The same grass and the same
green boughs overhead, the same flowers I had known in earliest infancy
blooming like tiny remembered faces in every meadow and on the banks
of every stream. The same little footpaths of peace across every hill,
winding according to the minds of those happy travelers who made them.

But the most enterprising business man was never more quickly involved
than I was in plans and preparations for happiness. The old cabin to be
restored and furnished, all about to be cleared and trimmed. I saw the
frost crystals blooming in the gray dawn of every morning that first
winter. The longest day was too short to accomplish what must be done
before the next day. I was in the woods choosing timber for more rooms
to be added to the cabin. I was something of a nautilus in those days,
without the sublime indifference of that little sailing mollusk to the
passage of time. I was in a hurry to finish my house.

But, like the nautilus, I have gone on adding to it year by year
according to the widening chambers of my mind. There will be a wall,
a pillar unfinished somewhere when my own end comes. I shall probably
defer death by an effort of mortal will if I am having another window
cut in order to get one more entrancing view of this valley at the very
last. I do not know whether this is foolishness or not, but I have left
much copy of my mind and spirit written in stones that will last longer
than the monument Horace raised to himself, ‘more enduring than brass.’

I made a garden and planted it. I was in the fields from dawn until
dusk that first spring, watching the plows sink deep in the loam of the
land. To me, there is no fragrance comparable in sweetness to the scent
of freshly turned earth. Later I walked like an impudent little god of
a woman down the rows of young corn. I remember praying for the corn
that year during a long drought, not that I needed bread so fiercely
earned, but because to see it living and growing was like feeling the
green blades of my own vanity spreading and rustling in the sun.

Somewhere in this house there is a snapshot made of me that summer
standing up on a load of wheat sheaves. I am wearing a stiff white
frock. I am bareheaded and the wind is blowing. I do seem to have a
high happy look. There streams across my face something of the light of
youth, keen and strong. Love alone can so transfigure us. I am in love,
you understand. My heart is embracing this sky, this meadow, these
overshadowing hills. I am feeling the wreaths of little blue flowers
that bloom beside the streams upon my brow. I am strong and well again,
cured of so many sorrows. My heel has touched the earth again. Auteas
was right about that--if you believe in your heel and the life of the
earth you can recover strength as he did for the next struggle.

I was that child I used to be, let loose like a joyful energy. So this
is something I have discovered about happiness: It is not a product
of energy, but of chance, a free mind and deliverance from that
parsimonious sense of time which no child ever feels. This marked the
difference now between the woman I was and the child I had been. I took
every chance then with a free mind and no sense at all of time. I was
too young to make plans. I met the future as a lark meets the sky upon
the wings of a singing heart. I was nearer kin to God then and had a
wiser sense of life than I shall ever know again.

The simpler creatures manage life more gracefully than we do. I have
often envied the birds, not because they can sing, but because they
can fly. They own everything from the tallest tree top to the farthest
meadow’s rim; but they have no sense of possession, no baggage to
carry. They endure more hardships than we do and have a better time.
The difference between them and, say, the communists, is that they are
not acquisitive. They do not want to own everything in common. They
are honest about that, and no man is. He must be either predatory or
competitive. He has an instinct for ownership which he is determined to
satisfy.

This earth would be settled by squatters if a comparatively few people
did not hold titles to most of it. The latter are safer neighbors
than the migratory class to which the communists really belong. They
are a kind of human locust swarming over the earth now, never to be
confounded with the earlier pioneers. I suppose in time we shall get
rid of them. If we do not, they will destroy us. Then they will turn
upon themselves. They are by purpose destructive, according to some
rascally notion of gain. Their piety is a sort of missionary malice
couched in the noblest deceit of language.

But with all the virtues and aspirations the best of us claim, it does
seem strange that we make such an awkward art of living. We are more
successful at increasing our capital and decorating ourselves with
worldly distinctions than we are at increasing our income in happiness.
This is essential. I have no patience with the piety of defeat which
yields the point and declares that happiness was never meant for us
in this present world, but reserved for us in paradise--a damnable
doctrine which reflects upon the goodness of God as they do who lay
their misfortunes to Providence when they alone are responsible for
them.

It is we who miss our cue. We suffer from some blindness of the mind
which leads us to mistake the circumstances that produce happiness.
Nothing will satisfy us but riches, when we know that relative poverty
insures more peace and fewer responsibilities. We have built a social,
industrial and commercial civilization, so expensive that it cannot
be financed. And the more wealth we get the less capable we are of
achieving our own lives.

It is the laborers, servants, and professional people whom we employ
that determine the conditions under which we exist, which is a form of
frightful tyranny. We get the idea or the ideal, then pay some one else
to achieve it. An architect draws the plans of our house. Carpenters
build it. A decorator chooses the furnishings, and servants keep it. A
landscape artist lays off the grounds and we employ someone to dress
the garden, because we lack the will and skill to do any of these
things.

I do not think we should give ourselves such airs about art and culture
as we do, seeing that we buy most of the mere effects of these things
and that they are really produced by a class of people with whom we do
not associate. No man is really learned who speaks his wisdom instead
of practicing it. No woman is really cultured because she is up on
art and music and literature, or because she wears beautiful clothes
designed by a modiste, or because she lives in a splendid house, or
because she is surrounded by people who think and speak well about
what they know and see and exquisitely feel. She is merely the living
portrait of many arts accomplished by other people. I should call her
the decadent mollusk of refinement, never to be confounded with that
woman depicted a while ago in these pages as the more endearing type
of Southern woman. They have their occupations. They are amazingly
executive when it comes to ordering others to do it. They have taste
and piety and know how to exercise these virtues.

The effects of the theories about the art of living which I have been
recording in these pages are plainly visible in this valley. The gaping
logs of the one-room cabin left by the Cherokee Indians have been
restored, and so many rooms added that it stretches a distance of one
hundred and thirty feet--pieced together with open entries, winged
with a long vine-covered court on one side and a living porch on the
other side. So you may see through this house to the valley below or
the hills beyond, as one should see through a good man’s heart to the
scenes and Scriptures which account for his existence. I doubt if an
architect could have drawn plans of a house so satisfying to the spirit.

There is no color scheme inside. To my mind, a house furnished in a
strictly harmonious manner seems to be designed for publication and
read by guests, but not to be lived in at ease in your own private
everyday moods lest you break a note by moving something of a blue
shade to that place which calls for orange-yellow, or by dropping your
old green coat upon the divan covered with iridescent tapestry. Even
the company bedrooms in this house are so plain and comfortable that a
guest might feel at home in them, clean and fragrant, but faded; little
messy conveniences in every one of them to delude the occupant into
thinking he or she is not a transient there, but may stay a long time.
And the living-room is such a humanly gifted place that I may leave my
walking shoes on the hearth upon a winter evening and they will add a
note of peace to the firelit scene, as if they were warming and drying
and resting after a hard day’s walking out of doors in bad weather.

Not one thing in this house is to be admired, but is to be appropriated
and used for your ease. You are to shine and talk, hold a book in your
hand to taste now and then, as in the old days a gentleman sipped his
wine. I have seen very dull people exhilarated before my fire on a
winter evening; I have also seen very bright ones let go their weary
wits and nod. These are triumphs which color-scheming hostesses rarely
enjoy, because you feel that you must sit up with their harmonies and
take note or be damned.

Besides, these women are never contented for long with their furniture
or draperies. They must tear them up, send for the decorator and try
some other effect. I do not change my furniture or move it about. Let
the scenes of the world and all fashions change. I have laid my inside
scenes like one of those prayers for peace and honor to be found in
the Episcopal prayer book written and finished. All you have to do is
recite it. God has been familiar with it for a long time, and would
probably be astonished to hear a new word or phrase in it.

There is an old-man chair here which, by all the canons of art, should
never be found in a cabin; mahogany, with hideously carved legs, toe
nails sticking out, the arms finished with two human heads, females,
but not goddesses--houris, I should say. The springs in the seat have
weakened in precisely the right place to make sitting in it more
restful. About as often as an old man is barbered, this chair is rubbed
up and the faces of the ladies polished; but it is never moved from
the corner beside the fireplace. I have observed that the elderly men
who come here invariably choose it as their resting place. There is a
huge couch beneath a long row of casement windows on the living porch
which has enticed some of the stiffest, most elegant people known to
modern society in this section to relax upon it and fall asleep, when
by all the rules of polite conversation they should have been erect and
vocative.

This is boasting--I admit it--but not of my possessions. I am simply
showing the kind of mind I have toward a house, to fill it with snares
of peace and good will whatever happens to art. It is not a bad idea.
You excite less criticism and confer more happiness. It cannot be done
by an interior decorator. He has an expensive eye and a furniture
collector’s intellect.

By the same token, I have declined the services of a landscape
gardener. My idea of a landscape is a good deal of it, preferably
green, and merely frilled with flowers, with the trees of an original
forest surrounding the whole thing. I planted my flowers years ago,
perennials, with much the same mind the Lord had when he said to the
original creatures and little leaves, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ They
do. Poppies, peonies, gladioli, zinnias, marigolds, phlox, dianthus,
snapdragons, like good hardy people of the soil in bloom, making a
thousand wreaths of loveliness around this green hill in their seasons.
No wet-nursing to keep them alive during a drought, no coddling to
preserve them through the winter. They die down as we do, and come
again, as we shall do.

During these first years here I was near the verge of happiness, at
least by anticipation. If my mind could have rested I might have made
it; but what with writing a book or two every year, conducting the farm
and building everything from barns to stone walls that popped into my
head, I lacked the leisure to be glad.

It seems to me now that I indulged in too much self-expression without
looking for the reward of gratified vanity such persons usually crave.
Comparatively few people have ever seen this valley or know what has
been accomplished here. I have occupied it much as I shall presently
occupy my grave, alone, but doubtless with a great deal more activity
than the narrow confines of a grave with a tombstone over you can
possibly afford.

I cannot think what made me so furiously industrious laying scenes
so rarely to be praised. As to that, we must always wonder why the
Lord required such limitless spaces for His creation and made so many
unintelligible stars. Fewer would have been rarer and shown to a better
advantage. And what measly sight-seers of the heavens we make, always
snooping and squinting at His handiwork without being able to find
out anything about it, with no mind to comprehend the glory of these
populous heavens.

There must be another audience somewhere. Surely the Almighty has
had more encouragement than we could give Him, more inspiration
than our pathetically inadequate existence affords Him. I am so
religious at times that I can conceive of a great council chamber of
creators located upon one of the grander stars between burning suns.
Not that I crave more than one Lord to serve. When we consider the
Ten Commandments and the rules laid down for our obedience in the
Scriptures of our Jehovah, it is apparent that no man could serve more
than one God; but in certain moods one likes to speculate in gods by
way of the most gallant and adventurous spiritual exercise.

The thing that confounds and depresses me is, Why are so many of us
born? Why is there so much of everything anyhow, when we can understand
and use so little of anything? And what strange madness is this in us
which perpetually compels us to add to the sum total of everything? I
have had fearful thoughts along this line--the dreadful fate we are
under to keep on thinking and doing, because if we stop something
happens to us, a slow and monstrous decay. And at the end of it all,
poor old Solomon--after he had been King of Jerusalem and ruled a long
time, after he had built his golden temple and won his reputation for
being the wisest man--sitting in his royal robes, tired of his crown,
tired of his wisdom, calling to us down the ages, ‘Vanity, vanity, all
is vanity and vexation of spirit.’

He gives this conclusion a note of authority by signing it, ‘Thus saith
the Preacher.’ But I have always felt that if Solomon had been a better
man he might have been a better preacher. Like father, like son. David
was a fine, true singer of the hearts of men; but I cannot think he
set a good example for Solomon in his youth, which accounts for the
depressing wisdom he acquired by living.

I never take one of these headers in spiritual speculations, however,
without falling to pieces afterwards. I seem to suffer from some kind
of nervous prostration of the soul. In these ailing moods no wise
man or great divine could comfort me. I am longing to hear the Word
preached by a simple man who has lived a good little life and who can
pray like a child. It is like taking the shortest, narrowest path back
home by faith.

I never have believed it is a far journey to the real kingdom of
Heaven. If you start off with great preparations for a long pilgrimage,
you may be sure you have missed your way. There is in the heart of
every man a fair and lovely land, never betrayed by his transgressions,
never sold to the world and never darkened by mortal wisdom. I have
been there sometimes, an ineffable place. As a child I lived there.

These little old preachers mentioned a while ago are the only pastors
of the children we have been left among us. They do not know us now,
they are not acquainted with the world in which we have learned so
much; but they know where every man’s land of Canaan lies, and they
have only one Rock of Ages tune that leads to it.

Looking back, we can see how smart we were when at the time we simply
followed some instinct in the right direction.

For years I went on trying to create my own little kingdom of Heaven
here behind these hills. A place visible to the naked eye, very
deceptive in its loveliness and silence. I had sense enough to keep
the world out, which was not difficult, since I have never been one of
those popular writers whose doorsill the people seek. And I was rarely
tempted out into the world.




XXXIX

WAR


During the spring and summer of 1914 I put seventy acres of the valley
under cultivation, added eight rooms to the old cabin, and wrote a
serial. The inspiration of love or of any consuming ambition greatly
augments the powers of even an ordinary person to achieve. This is the
reason why men in love frequently accomplish so much for a time, then
fall back into their former state of indolence. The illusion of love
has failed. It is by nature a brief enchantment. This is the reason why
the man fired by ambition frequently accomplishes prodigious tasks far
beyond his normal capacity to achieve.

I was inspired at this time with the hope of winning a happy ending
to what had been a harsh sentence in living. I was creating a very
small world to fit me behind the world at large; and this period, I
should say, was about the morning and evening of the third day at the
business. Things were beginning to turn green. I could see my little
herbs of the field glistening in the early morning dew, and my sun was
shining. I remember a certain notion I had then, which has remained a
part of my personal definition of the Lord--that besides being almighty
and obviously beneficent He must be a happy God every time he created
another world, divided the light from the darkness in that place and
set up all the miracles of life there.

This notion was not so blasphemous as it sounds written out in words.
One cannot copy His omniscience or His almightiness, but it does _not_
seem to me nearly so profane to give one’s self a few airs about having
imitated Him in a small way that turns out green and triumphant like a
field of corn, as it does to dig down and snoop the heavens with the
idea of proving there is no God at all.

I had only to take a whiff around the farm in those days, have an
altercation with the carpenters about another window needed to keep the
cabin from looking too much like a fortress, then retire to my study
upon the farther rim of the forest and copy the green leaves of my
thoughts for the next chapter of the serial.

On the third day of August in that year the Great War began in Europe.
The editor of ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ sent his first batch of war
correspondents across the following week. I was to have been one of
them, but I had promised another serial for another magazine which
was still to be written. The editor would neither release me from the
contract nor risk me in the war zone until this copy was delivered.

I suppose it would require one of those latest expositors of the
mysteries human beings are, an alienist, to explain why disappointment
over being detained brought on the first attack of hay fever I ever
had. There is more psychology than pathology in our diseases.

But I was determined to go to France in 1914. I had been living at
such a high tension nervously for some time that nothing short of a
bloody war could have quieted me and reduced me to a normal condition.
The motive here confessed was overlaid with the usual noble emotions;
but this is a truthful record of my mind, which is sufficiently nearly
related to human minds in general for me to risk the assertion that
a great many other people did valiant service in France who were
attracted there by a similar motive. We seek reactions from what we are
in excitement. The use made of us under these circumstances proves the
shrewd economies of Providence by employing our lower instincts to trap
us into the performance of the greatest, most unselfish services, else
very few men would volunteer for military service, and very few women
would have volunteered for canteen service in France.

I hurried off somewhere, wrote that serial, returned to New York and
sailed for Liverpool all within thirty days.

I have written briefly of my impressions during this harrowing period
in ‘My Book and Heart.’ What we know now is that the most victorious
battles and the most disastrous defeats never settle the issues
involved. The Great War has increased our debts, doubled our problems
and added incredibly to the moral confusion of our times. Still, if
there should be a call to arms in this country to-morrow, I doubt if I
could bear the mortal ignominy of being a pacifist.

There is no sense in war. It is the way we are made that brings on the
red fury of arms. Neither the ambition of politicians nor the greed
of financiers could draw a nation into war if the people were not so
easily moved by an invitation to shed blood. It seems invariably to
produce a state of terrific exaltation, similar to a religious revival.
I doubt if this is due so much to the survival of brutal instincts in
men as to some provision of Providence against the ultimate emergencies
of mankind. When law, civilization and the artificial restraints of
society fail him, he will still have his fists and a faculty for
believing in God. These two capacities alone should reproduce men of
better quality than the shrinking creeds of pacifism. Whatever we
believe theoretically about peace, we should always be ready by nature
to fight.

But another set of youths must grow into the pugilistic period now
before we could actually stage another World War. My observation has
been that the soldiers who fought in the recent one are more or less
shell-shocked. I have employed more soldiers here than any other class
of men since the war, because they are more intelligent and better
trained; and no matter how brave the record is they have left behind
them in the Saint-Mihiel drive or the Argonne Forest, they are more
concerned than other men to avoid personal difficulties. One must
think it out to understand them; their reputation for courage has been
established beyond any shadow of a doubt so long as history lasts.
There is no reason why a battle-scarred man should prove his courage,
which is probably the chief reason why men fight. They are the only
admirable pacifists in the world; and if it comes to the test, they
will have more to do with keeping this nation out of war than a World
Court or any other talking method we can devise, however wise or
diplomatic.

War, however victoriously ended, is not a profitable subject to discuss
in the retrospect. It dies down in the emotions of men and passes into
history. After that, the next generation reads history and discovers
what burdens and strange defeats were entailed upon their future by
these victories. But I am setting down one incident in connection with
my experiences in France by way of proving a theory I have--that merely
by living we fulfil more prophecies than the seers of the Old Testament
ever dreamed of. We are becoming terrible predicators of the future.

It was in October of 1914. A clear starlit night. A battle was on. News
from the front ran through Paris in whispers all day. Now darkness and
silence. No one could sleep. I came down from my room in the old Saint
James Hotel and stood in the street, reaching a long look through this
tomb of terrors that had been the gayest city in Europe three months
ago. Not a soul in sight, not the sound of a voice or the rumble of a
wheel, peopled now only with the shadows of great shapes. Yet in this
fearful stillness these very palaces and spires seemed to listen, to be
waiting for something about to happen.

Then from the high distances came a rhythmic sound, thunder throttled
down, stars purring, a pulse beating faster in the heavens. Now the
ominous roar of motors. Swift as swallows in flight, I saw them rise
above the horizon and flash by like great silver birds through the
searchlights above the city--German aeroplanes coming to drop bombs
on Paris! Red blasts, earth-rocking detonations! This tomb of terrors
gave up its dead, a frightful population of men and women rushed half
clad and disheveled from their hiding places into the open street. They
shrieked, babbled, waved their arms, milled and circled, frenzied with
fear and hate.

I stood aside like a mere leaf of life not yet caught in this whirlwind
of dreadful passions. The scene was no longer linked in my mind with
war, but with something else far back in memory, associated with
quietness and peace. Then it came back to me, that night so many years
ago, the world not yet in sight, the quiet heavens, father thrusting
his arm out in a gesture like a scythe aimed at all the spaces
overhead; the child I was then, bare feet resting staunchly upon the
toes of his boots, clinging to him, face upturned to him, feeling
like any other young bird about to be borne aloft upon magnificently
gesticulating wings.

Through all this uproar of a panic-stricken people, in a strange city
on the other side of the world, forty years later, I heard again the
very tones of father’s voice: ‘You will live to see airships up there
flying like a flock of birds.’ Then mother’s sharper tones breaking
in upon this rumbling prophecy: ‘Come in and go to bed,’ calling me
away from the temptation of so great an imagination, anxious lest I
should be birthmarked mentally with that mad passion to fly which had
frequently cropped out in father’s family.

Well, I had lived to see his prophecy fulfilled. But what a
fulfillment! This happens frequently to the best efforts made by seers.
The world twists the tail of their prophecy and makes it come true like
a disaster.

On the twenty-third day of December in this same year of 1914 I was at
home again in the valley, sitting beside my own log fire, very quiet,
but not serene. I was suffering from a curious pallor of the mind,
not due entirely to the dreadful scenes I had passed through in the
war zone. We were homeward bound from Liverpool when the boat struck
a mine off the coast of Ireland. This catastrophe happened in the
middle of the night, and I was still convalescing from the peculiarly
sickening sensation of suddenly standing on my head in the berth with
no such acrobatic intentions. I could not forget the tremors which
passed through that ship as if it had been a living body pierced to the
heart, the awful heaviness with which it settled back into the sea,
the moments like ages of dreadful silence that followed, then the roar
and confusion on deck, the sibilant sounds of many voices hushed to
whispers by fear, the rush of bare feet along the corridors inside as
the passengers fled for the lifeboats, which were not needed after all.
And I shall never entirely recover from the recollection of that jagged
hole in the side of the boat, so frailly mended, nor from the sound of
the water pouring in and the rhythmic strokes of the pumps upon which
our lives depended.

I am wondering if the critics who found ‘My Book and Heart’ the record
of a narrow and monotonous existence can claim one year filled with so
many varied activities as the year 1914 was for me. And I am merely
offering it as a sample of my years in general.




XL

WIDOWHOOD


The older you are the greater risk to your happiness, and even to your
peace, there is in marriage. I cannot conceive of a husband revolving
comfortably in the widow’s orbit I have measured off and made for
myself. Least of all can I conceive of his sitting still in it with any
peace of mind. I suppose many other women feel the same way, else there
would not be four times as many widows as widowers in this country,
according to the United States census.

A widower is probably the most transient manifestation of man there is
among us. I have often wondered why this is so. I am no alienist, which
is now that supreme authority among us for determining our character
and conduct according to our glands; but my suspicion is that marriage
once contracted becomes a habit with a man, and that he is the most
invincible habit-forming creature on this earth.

You may feed one only three articles of food for a year and he will
stick to them as long as he lives! I knew one who cured himself of
indigestion twenty years ago by taking a cup of tea and two pieces of
dried apricot for lunch. He has never varied his midday meal from that
day to this. If his wife died, I suppose he would marry again precisely
as he goes to his club and orders that cup of tea and the preserved
apricots for lunch.

On the other hand, marriage is a state of love for women--barring
the alimony class, of course--and they are so narrow and personal in
their devotion that they do not so readily transfer their allegiance
to another husband. Apparently they are not so enterprising or
broad-minded in their romantic emotions as men are, though we seem
to be widening out considerably in these latter years. It would not
surprise me if the time comes when even widows may become obsolete, and
we shall have no such wisdom among us as a sad, sweet-faced elderly
woman wearing her widow’s weeds and sitting in the amen corner, or
ambling about doing good deeds in the neighborhood. She may have her
second or third husband and be engaged in a campaign for a better
sewerage system in the city where she lives.

What I mean is that we seem to be growing more like men mentally and
morally every day and in every way. I reckon it is all for the best,
but it does feel queer if you are a woman and a widow who cannot keep
up with the quick step of your times and know yourself to be dwindling
away into the narrow, withered-faced relict of your former husband.

I remember one day years ago, decorating myself with such ladylike
views as these in a conversation with Mark Sullivan, who had just
refused a story I offered for Collier’s Magazine. He listened kindly
and patiently until I had probably exhausted my repertoire of noble
sentiments for that day. Then he seized his hat and made for the door,
thought better of it, paused, looked back at me curiously and delivered
himself of this warning:

‘You may be that good, but if you are, you are bound to be lonesome.’

For a moment I experienced some kind of faint alarm, as sinners must
when the preacher gives them one last chance at the end of a revival to
repent and be free men. It occurred to me that I had better hurry out
while the spirit moved me and do something rash. But I could think of
nothing sane, discreet, and becoming to do that would also be rash. I
am not so sure it is conscience that makes cowards of us all. It may be
the vanity of self-respect that holds us in check.

After all, I have not been so very lonely, only slightly peeved as I
grow older at the implication of having lived a narrow, dreary life.

Years ago, after the death of my husband, I adopted one of the milder
sins of our times, much as my mother, who was a very frugal woman,
used to be wasteful with pins because she insisted that a little
inexpensive extravagance was good for the soul. I do not know about
that; but I am still so ashamed of my transgression I will not confess
it, although with a discerning eye you may see it for yourself as one
of the complimentary details in the picture on the frontispiece page of
‘My Book and Heart.’ Otherwise I am far behind my times in yielding to
temptations.

If you had only one lover when you were a girl, and married him,
and if you lived very quietly with him until death parted you, not
taking in more than the spiritual edges of the world, you do not know
men; you know only one man. As to the rest, you know some by their
reputations--some good, some not good; some who will lead in prayer.
The great majority are beyond your ken because they will not lead in
prayer, nor contribute to foreign missions, nor even to the pastor’s
salary. If you have been a preacher’s wife for nearly a quarter of a
century, you entertain a vague suspicion of such men without having any
information about their real characters.

This is what happened to me as long as Lundy lived. A man was a sheep
or a goat, and that was the limit of my powers of classification; a
very remote way of thinking about them.

I do not know how it may be with other widows. I suppose if they have
a competency, and can afford to employ an agent to look after their
affairs, they frequently retain their social and romantic ideals of
these wonderful beings and remain peacefully ignorant of their sterner
manifestations. But if you must earn your own livelihood and manage
your own affairs, you will discover that you come face to face and hand
to hand with men every day in every way upon a totally different basis.
You cannot practice the arts and policies which made you so successful
in managing your dear husband, not if you mean to be an honest,
upstanding widow. Your mourning veil may appeal to their compassion,
but it will have practically no effect upon loosening up their business
sense in your favor. What is more to the point, it is a sly, unfair way
of playing upon their sex or your sex to expect concessions in your
favor.

My idea of a ‘widow indeed’ is somewhat broader and more practical
than Saint Paul’s. I am not objecting to his requirements--that she
shall have washed the saint’s feet, if her piety takes this form, and
if she can find the saint; but I do not see why she should be more
diligent than any other woman in ‘following every good work,’ unless,
as I suspect was the case with the widows in Timothy’s church at
Macedonia, she was a charge upon the charity of that church and repaid
in humble service to the brethren. The modern widow is not so reduced
in circumstances, even if she is left without means. She can usually
earn a living, though it may not be so good a living as her husband
provided. In any case, a self-respecting ‘widow indeed’ now is one who
takes a job instead of charity and performs it with valor instead of
tears. The pith of honor in such a woman is not to play the feminine
rôle to any man for largess or advantage in her affairs. Even on this
basis she is apt to get more than is coming to her if she deals with
the right man. The great majority of honest men actually shrink from
the responsibility of handling widows’ funds lest some unavoidable loss
occur.

On the other hand, there is an average, I should say, of at least
ten mite collectors for every widow in existence. They are easily
recognized, however, by the noble and vicarious disposition they
show for being her financial savior or her Aladdin genius in a
get-rich-quick scheme. Not long ago I had a letter from such a victim.
She is a stranger to me in the flesh, but I should recognize her
in paradise--an elderly widow, religious, full of kindness, always
protected, whose creed is faith in the goodness, honesty, and kindness
of others.

She wrote to tell me that she had just invested all she could spare
in an oil well. And she asked me to pray that this money might bring
her ten or even a hundred fold in return. Imagine the Lord babbling in
wildcat oil speculations to answer even two widows’ prayers! Teach us
some sense by not answering such prayers--which is a thing many people
wiser than widows do not know about the functioning of the Almighty
toward prayers. Maybe in time we shall learn that the Maker of all laws
will not break one natural or moral law to save us from either death or
bankruptcy. It is no use to call upon God like a fool to save you when
He has endowed you with the wit to save yourself if you will only use
it.

The last I heard of this widow she was the poor dear shorn lamb of
those oil speculators. Where one wins her golden fleece, a thousand are
clipped clean of their honest wool.

After the death of my husband I suffered for the first time in my
life from the inferiority complex. I was left not merely a widow but
strangely benighted, like a foreigner who is totally ignorant of the
manners and customs of the people with whom he is to deal. I suppose
many women have had this experience, and may think it is grief. It is
terror and uncertainty. If she survives it honorably, with her head
up and her banners flying, she will be obliged to shed her widow’s
veil and be born again mentally no matter how soundly she may have
been converted previously to the wisdom of spiritual things. She will
be obliged to study something besides the Scriptures, and get stout
secular doctrines for dealing with a vastly competitive and acquisitive
world. Clinging to the cross is nothing to the way she must cling to
her own good sense. The Lord encourages us to cling to that symbol of
faith, but it is no use clinging to the world that way. She must step
around in it with a firm tread and do business with her spectacles
properly adjusted.

Therefore I am recording it as truth here, hardly earned, that an
up-and-doing widow’s mind is one of the most remarkable mental
phenomena in existence; and I defy the ablest metaphysician to analyze
the thing. It is made up of feminine faculties, stiffened, sharpened,
sweetened, soured and tempered to any emergency, and she has ten
emergencies where a man has one, because every one with whom she deals
perceives that she is a woman and proceeds upon that basis. She is
much more of one than the average woman ever learns to be, but, good
heavens, what a furtive, brave, serpentine, dove-good use she has got
of her little old knitting-needle faculties!

I spent three years after the death of my husband walking softly
beneath my widow’s veil, studying the situation which the world was
to me. I worked hard, made no investments and suffered from one long
nightmare of terror and grief. I know exactly how it feels to have lost
my right hand for achieving life, to get up cured of the wound, but
with only my left hand to support me, when I had never been obliged to
support myself at all.

Widows deal with men if they earn a living, or even if they do not. The
thing which alarmed me was the discovery that I knew nothing about men,
and that they are mysterious. Their mental processes are different from
those of women, although emotionally and every other way the family
resemblance between us is so strong as to be misleading. They have a
different way of planning and accomplishing their purposes. They have
a conscience, probably a better and more scrupulous conscience than we
have about a few things, but theirs has a wide-open loose end, through
which they can pass out to achieve without a qualm some great deed that
we would never pay the price in piety to accomplish.

I perceived with a sort of terror how able and uncanny they are, due
chiefly to this circumstance. They have by nature more liberty of
action than we can afford to exercise. This is one reason why many
modern women look so queer and out of drawing. They are making the
experiment. The result is a parody. No originality, they are aping
men, as a feebler race imitates a stronger race. If I am any judge of
the real moral greatness of women, they will suffer a revulsion of
sensibility presently and take to their heels. It is safe and honorable
to associate intimately with one’s husbands, sons and father, and
discreetly with one’s Christian brethren in the Church, though I am
wary about that; but my notion is that it is dangerous, indelicate,
frequently degrading to what we are, to associate too intimately with
men in their political, professional, and other manifestations.

I may be wrong about this. My opinion may spring like hypocrisy from
cowardice, because I have not the courage to risk the losses these
women sustain. My only excuse is that I came up in a different age and
had my morals and sense of womanhood formed under different influences.
If the modern woman does hold fast, and win and prove herself an asset
instead of a liability in this civilization, I hope to bow my old gray
head to her and take off my shoes before her in reverent recognition of
the fact that she will have become the greatest pioneer of the ages,
against the greatest odds, with the noblest courage.

In the meantime I am wearing my shoes, holding my neck stiff and
regarding her over the top of my spectacles like a harsh, narrow-minded
old mother who would like to snatch her daughters from a dangerous
maelstrom and set them to the tasks at home that would make men instead
of bandits of their sons, and proper maidens instead of adventurous
flappers of their daughters. The best mother I ever knew never cast a
ballot, but she established her sons in the way they should go. She
has been dead for years, but she is still voting these men in every
election.

Maybe I should have omitted these reflections. When you have survived
your own world, and are now merely the spectator of another world in
the making, you cannot be qualified to pass judgment upon it. I let
that go with this polite apology and return to the problems which faced
me so many years ago when I became a widow.




XLI

ALL SORTS OF MEN


At safe distance I have spent much time observing men and the world
they are making through the field glasses of my mind. I still prefer it
to any world women can make. This is not an indication of turpitude,
but due, no doubt, to my gender and the association of ideas. We know
that men are strong by the deeds they have performed, the cities
they have built and the cities they have taken; by the courage they
have shown in war and in the face of wildernesses to be conquered,
and by every hardship which women endure but cannot overcome. So I
instinctively look up to men.

I am not defending myself, although women have made great strides
recently in discovering how weak and unworthy men have always been of
the confidence we reposed in them. I am not reposing much confidence in
them, but I am simply admitting that the tilt of my gaze toward them is
instinctive and prayerful, not rational, any more than personal faith
in God would be regarded as reasonable by a materialist. But observe
the advantage I have of the rationalist, who is reduced to the dirt
dauber’s creed of worshiping his own intellect, while I enjoy the more
becoming distinction of spreading wider wings upward.

My ideas about men spring from the same shrewd source of financing my
future by faith--that evidence of things hoped for but not seen. I am
determined to remain the weaker vessel and to hold them to the higher
altitude of superior beings. It is more profitable and the surest way
of forcing them to make good. They are only too willing to part with
their responsibilities to these valiant modern women who are so anxious
to prove their own ability to assume these burdens and bear them.

I have no doubt there is a smile up the sleeve of every man in this
country as he watches the return of his women to servitude, not the old
domestic bondage, but every other kind. Millions of them bread winners,
filling positions at half the price these positions paid when men
filled them. No wonder men can afford an eight-hour working day. Enough
women are working longer hours to more than make up the difference in
the common-to-all income. No wonder there are so many strikes. They can
afford the luxury and disturbance on the sweat of the women.

In the same way they are serving men in politics, because they can
reach a class of constituents the male candidate cannot reach, and
because they can practice arts he never had to get him elected. I am
wondering what will happen when these women discover that they cannot
make this a good little world to live in by amendments, and that
all their labor and devotions have been spent for the promotion and
gratification of men, as usual. My prediction is that there will be
such a shrieking strike as the whole National Guard cannot put down,
because every striker will rush home, and fling herself upon the bed
to do her shrieking.

I hope I shall live to see that holy day. It will mark the defeat of
men and their return to duty in a strangely diminished frame of mind.
But I shall never see it. The thing will come to pass so gradually, one
woman at a time coming to her senses, and then taking refuge in nervous
prostration or some other condition obviously and naturally beyond the
power of men to reach or control her.

The only man I had ever known was, as it happened, different from other
men. He desired above all things to be meekly and truly blameless
before the Lord. God was his public opinion. I was amazed, you may say,
to the point of fainting spiritually to discover that men in general
have no such instinct for piety. In his heart I do believe the veriest
saint among them would shrink from a too notorious reputation for being
merely good and entirely virtuous, although the least and meanest one
of them wishes to appear great, if it is only to one woman, no matter
how short he is in personal virtues.

I believe they are all more spiritually inclined than we are; but
heavens, what unscrupulous spirituality! It is a sort of noble side
line they carry. They crave as we never do the sensations of power,
exaltation. This, I believe, is the psychological explanation of why
many men take to intoxicants before they feel the need of artificial
stimulants which the hard pressure of this swiftly moving age now
brings. They want to feel like gods, they wish to enjoy the sensations
of being hard-boiled, when by nature they are polite, timid little
fellows. They wish to feel for a moment the power in their heel to kick
the world around, though as a rule they remain sufficiently sober not
to lift a foot in the actual experiment.

The fool wants to be witty. The Smart Aleck wishes to light all his
candles at once and watch himself shine. The man with a bad conscience
longs for the false courage to swank about like a supervillain and
rejoice in his iniquities. And there are those who drink to drown their
sorrows, although my observation is that they will do it before they
have any griefs or legitimate depressions from weariness or hardship to
overcome. They are really suffering from that masculine embarrassment
in sobriety of knowing how limited they are in power and other
godlikenesses which all men perpetually crave. If even all the women
in the world would concede these qualities, humor them with sufficient
admiration and reverence, we should have no need for the Eighteenth
Amendment, seeing that these several classes of men would be already
sublimely intoxicated.

They have not made good as gods in spite of these divine retchings,
but they have built a magnificent world. I will warrant there is
nothing comparable to their achievements on any of the other planets
of our solar system. But you will not find the mark of one feminine
finger upon the architecture of this one and very few traces of the
feminine imagination in these great accomplishments. We have our good
points, but they are not architecturally or literally constructive.
We are, I should say, at best the patient conservators of what men
make, win, and produce. This is the reason why dissipation is far less
excusable in women than men. They have their vanities and virtues, but
no such boundless egotism to keep up and satisfy. When we are forever
physically incapable of being the builders and achievers that men are,
I do think it is regrettable that we should imitate that vice in them
which is merely the mortal weakness of a sublime quality.

We have our feminine deceits, ten thousand, but obvious and appealing.
Men have another kind, which also spring from their passion for
augmenting themselves, not endearing themselves. The vainest woman
who ever lived does not crave the admiration of men as men crave that
of women. They want it whether they want her or her love or even her
property, whether she is young, old or blind. This is the reason why
they cannot be truthful or quite honest in their relation to us. It is
not the desire to deceive, but to shine, to rule and overcome us with
their minds and their wills.

I do not think any exercise of our recent rights as citizens will ever
overcome this handicap. The fact is it is fatal to do so. The moment a
man perceives himself diminished to his true proportions in a woman’s
eyes, she becomes offensive and repugnant to him, and he is right about
that. She was originally designed by her Maker to be the complimentary
mirror in which Adam might gaze to spoof himself to greater endeavors.

When I found out all these things about men it had a queer effect
upon me. I distinctly recall facing about, thinking Lundy up out of
his dust and reviewing him in the light of this new information. Had
I ever really understood my husband? I never shall know. That perfect
illusion which love is still clothed him, and I could make nothing of
all my remembered evidence beyond the kindness and patience and prayers
of our life together. I remember still with pleasure how grand and
superior he used to look when he flared into flames of fine eloquence
that put my light out. But just let any man try that now! I can see the
difference every time between the mere man of him and his eloquence.
I am not moved. I simply regard him with a listening eye while I
divide the light of his words from his own darkness, whether real or
potential. If I should be won by his eloquence or his arguments, he has
the advantage. Presently I shall be taking his advice or adopting his
opinions against my own woman’s judgment, which is bad business, if you
know what I mean.

As near as I can tell the truth from memory, it was this instinct
of inferiority which led me to earn my life and my living in strict
retirement after my husband’s death. I perceived that the training
I had had with him in the scriptural simplicities of living was no
adequate preparation for competing with men in any way. I might hold a
candle to them, but I’d never hold my own with them. And trying to get
a working knowledge of them at the age I was then would have been like
trying to learn a foreign language after you are forty when you were
born with a lisping, stammering tongue.

There was another consideration that influenced me. As a wife I had
practiced the habits of obedience. My husband laid the scenes of our
life and controlled our destiny. I simply helped him do that. I had
been confirmed in the womanly attribute of being guided by his stronger
will. What I discovered at the end of these three years’ thoughtfulness
is that every man’s will is stronger than any woman’s. She may outwit
him, but she cannot outwill him. It was not my idea to dizzy around as
a widow, being guided by this man or that one in my affairs. The best
thing I could do was to break the entail of that beautiful attribute
of obedience I had as a wife, tear it up like a scrap of paper, and
retreat to a safe distance. I meant to lay a few scenes of my own
devising and to become the captain of my own fate, let the Lord do as
he saw fit about my soul.

I was near to being tired of my soul by this time from worrying with
it and straining spiritually for so many years to the exclusion of
all earthly profits. Later, I did resume intimate relations with
it, because once you have adopted the ideals of a spiritual life
you are meanly impoverished without them. You are degraded in your
own consciousness as bitter, worm-eaten dust without this sublime
reservation held by faith, that there is eternal life no matter what
griefs you have had or what happiness you have missed or what an
ordinary person you have been all your life.

I feel these limitations keenly, and have always been extremely
anxious to find out for sure that I really am extraordinary and
immortal and worthy of my own admiration at the very last. I wish to
die proud.

This is something that can only happen to us in the next world, where I
hope to forget my mortal limitations and some of the ridiculous as well
as tragic mistakes I have made here that caricature me now to myself.
For the same reason I am not inclined to interpret too literally and
painfully those Scriptures which intimate that our memories will be
resuscitated with us. I do hope this is not obligatory. For I should
need no memory to recognize Lundy or Faith. I should know them as one
comes again in full possession of his mind and heart after a long
sleep. My idea of a happy resurrection would be to rise from my dust
cleansed from every embarrassing and diminishing recollection, because
this is the only way to be as prideful as one expects to be in Heaven.

Grief, however poignant, is like a wound, if you are not by nature
infirm, but a normal person with a strong mental constitution, you
recover from it as you would from any other wound or sickness. So
I recovered from the death of my husband. The health of my spirit
returned, and with it the idea of happiness began to freshen in my mind.

Faith was married by this time. I was alone and free to live that life
of mine which I had wished for as saints long for immortality. My
feeling has always been that happiness lies somewhere in Genesis, in
those first scenes of man. For this reason I set out for the hills
behind the world in Georgia, where the days come and go much as they
did in the beginning, where human speech is such a rare sound that
the dogs bark when they hear it in this valley, and where the song of
birds is the real language one hears. It is a place where there is no
wealth, no learning, and much natural wisdom of the woods, the hills
and streams. There are a few people, but I know them only as one knows
a little prose, a little poetry and a few Scriptures, not personally
nor intimately.

I have written at some length in ‘My Book and Heart’ of this old
cabin and the surroundings, but I am setting down now the real reason
for coming here. It was to escape the mind and will of the world, to
practice my own will and mind in living and so find happiness--that
animation of the mortal spirit which is far more refreshing than peace.

It was my way of laying claim to my own life. I am now in a position
to say that I very much doubt whether there is such a thing as a human
life which belongs exclusively to one person. It is something we borrow
from other men, from books, from a thousand sources, and something
we spend or lend likewise; but life does not belong to us as it does
to other living creatures, nor even to the grass. We are the most
dependent of all God’s creatures, not only upon one another, but upon
the beasts of the fields and upon everything that lives. And nothing we
win, even if it is everything, can possibly satisfy us. I suppose this
is one of those terrific provisions of Providence to keep us doing and
moving toward some far-off divine event.

What follows is the record of my adventures in this business. Launcelot
looking for the Holy Grail never traveled farther or endured greater
hardships than I have in this narrow valley looking for happiness. I
have worn all my virtues to a frazzle and I am about to grow old in
sorrowful defeats without attaining even the bright rim of the cup of
happiness. And now, when maybe it is too late, I have discovered the
mistake I made. This is scarcely reason enough to go on with these
annals, because when at the end I prove it and set it down in plain
words, not one who reads this tale can avoid making it. We are the
perpetual victims of an illusion. We may as well take what comes,
whether it is happiness or not, and avoid the struggle.




XLII

VARIOUS TYPES OF WOMEN


I suppose women are one of the essential provisions of Nature, but in
our minds we have never been satisfied with the arrangement. We feel
that there is some kind of imposition connected with it. We were simply
thought of afterwards; we were not an inspiration of creation, but we
were created to meet a necessity afterwards. This makes a difference.
We are not quite normal as men are. We still have a futile instinct to
escape from what we are. Thousands and thousands of years have not made
us contented and at home in ourselves. No man ever wished himself a
woman, but ask any one of us and if she is in a truthful mood she will
admit that she wishes she were a man. I have no doubt Eve regretted she
was not Adam.

Circumstances have favored us. From winning privileges, protections and
perquisites as we came up through the ages, we are at last getting some
queer advantages of the situation one way or another. But this makes no
difference. If we obtain the balance of power we seek, live the lives
men live and do the things they do, we shall still be women, subject as
usual to fits of nerves and tears on account of the long strain of not
being quite normal and at home in ourselves.

But when you have been a woman a long time, and have grown accustomed,
you may say by defeat, to the sensations of being one, you may look
back through your mind, which is quite different from looking back
through your history, and pick up much strange information about
yourself which you would never discover except in the retrospect.

For example, seeing the woman I used to be more clearly than I could
possibly have seen and measured her then, it occurs to me that I
may have been a kind of idiot, femininely speaking. What I mean is
that I seem to have been almost totally devoid of that engaging
self-consciousness which makes women noticeable and attractive to
men. I am embarrassed lest my husband may have found me delinquent in
the mere airs of femininity. I do not recall ever being coquettish
or feeling attractive; merely honest, kind, devoted, and at times
freakishly witty or gravely intelligent.

Maybe this was due to the fact that I was not pretty as men see
prettiness, and knew it, although I always felt beautiful, and must
have been absurdly contented with this inward conviction. Still I
have known many a homely woman who was amazingly attractive, like
that heroine in one of Madame de Staël’s novels to whose ‘bright dark
homeliness’ she refers so flatteringly. That is the point--if you must
be homely it is better to be dark about it. With black hair, black
eyes and even a swarthy skin you have only to turn on your light from
within to glow. I am too fair, not enough contrast between my blondness
and any brightness of expression I could turn on. Besides, I have what
would be called a lofty brow in a man, which gives me a damnably noble
look so far as beauty is concerned. During the thin years of my earlier
womanhood it was out of all sweetly feminine proportion to the lower
part of my face.

I am only suggesting a probable explanation, you understand; not that I
believe it myself, but hope some one else will. The feeling I have now
is that I missed part of my conduct as a woman at a time when it might
have contributed some to that happiness which I have also missed. What
I should like to know is whether women who have flown their banners in
many men’s hearts during their youth have memories of happiness that I
have not got. Do they recall those episodes with pleasure? Or do they
recall them at all? I have a queer, ruthless feeling that I could have
forgotten many men, and remembered forever only one. I wish I knew what
so many other women know about this. Maybe it is idle curiosity, but it
feels like lines I failed to recite in living.

At this late day I wonder what Lundy really thought of me. I have
observed this--that very few wives know what their husbands think of
them. I even wonder sometimes with the gravest trepidations what he
would think of me now. I have grown so sensible. I have almost lost the
gift of doing anything foolish and sweetly feminine, if I ever had it.
And yet the woman I never have been sits and looks through this bright
veil of mysteries, as we sometimes gaze reverently at the masterpiece
we never could have painted.

The only consolation I get in such a mood is a mean one. The women I
have known who enjoyed all these benefits do not impress me as being
eased by their experiences. I can think of a dozen who were belles in
their youth, who were happily married, who enjoyed all the distinctions
society and wealth can confer upon charming women. And now, at my age,
they have a curious, beautifully painted, bankrupt expression, as if
they had lost several fortunes and were facing the direst poverty in
their old age. I may be mistaken about this. They may have acquired
that restless, frantic look characteristic of them from habit on
account of doing things instead of sitting for years thinking things as
I have done.

Still, I feel like a stranger among them, as if they had practiced
some kind of feminine wit and dexterity in living that I do not know.
I believe it is something they learned of themselves which I cannot
learn. They know how to make an attraction of their modesty.

Now I have often wondered whether modesty is a cultivated virtue or
a quality of femininity. If it is a virtue to be attained by taking
thought, I have lacked it through the whole of my life. For I have
never been consciously modest, nor even felt the need of protecting
myself anywhere, nor the least anxiety about remaining neatly folded
and decent to the last.

One of the mysteries of feminine consciousness which I have never
fathomed is why so many women feel in some vague danger from men.
Why do they look under the bed to make sure no man is there? Years
ago I was going to prayer meeting one evening in a city accompanied
by a spinster. She was a dear good soul, but you may say almost
conscientiously homely. This was during that period when we wore broad
black leather belts to gear in our shirt waists and skirts. We were
stepping primly around the corner to the church when my companion
leaped into the air and screamed. Clinging to me in the wildest terror,
she vowed that a man had seized her by the belt from behind. It was no
use to ask her if she was sure it was a man: they always know it is a
man if anything happens to them. He alone is the plausible explanation.
It was a fact that she had lost her belt. The buckle had slipped and it
lay directly behind us on the pavement. Now why did she do that? One
might be tempted to suspect some indelicate lesion of the imagination
if it were not for the fact that good women, pure enough in heart to
see God, are subject to these vagaries.

When I had lived alone in this old cabin for ten years, without ever
suspecting it of having a man concealed in it, a friend came to spend
a month with me. She was seven years my senior, and you may say the
very pincushion of every feminine virtue, very modest. Nevertheless,
every evening before she retired she would take her candle and go
man-hunting through the house, upstairs, downstairs, and even into both
basements--just to make sure no man was in it.

Sometimes in the deeper, darker hours of the night she would appear
like a ghost in my room to whisper excitedly that she was sure she
had heard a man in the house. Then we would start forth to find this
wraith of her imagination, two elderly women buttoned to the chin in
our plain middle-aged nighties, her gray hair and my thin hair skewed
so tightly that it left nothing to be revealed concerning our faded
faces--terrible looking, but harmless creatures, bearing our quaking
candles, thrusting them into such corners and places as burglars only
inhabit in the feminine imagination. If we had actually discovered one
it would not have been we but the burglar who must have fainted at the
sight of us.

She could never realize the absurdity of these fruitless adventures,
but I always felt embarrassed and apologetic to mankind in general.
A woman must have more presumption than I have ever felt to imagine
herself in any kind of danger from men.

But that is my point. They are the more womanly women, and the dearer
kind to men. The telepathy of terror they experience toward this
imaginary man is none the less telepathy when they are not alarmed if
they are in social sight and distance of men. I suppose in the dark or
when they are alone and unprotected their fears are due to the survival
of a primitive instinct, out of date now, like the appendix in the
human body, but brought up with them from that far time when women were
in real danger of being seized and borne off by some marauding knight
on his saddlebow.

I suppose in the daytime, in the parlor or on the street, when these
same women are armed to the teeth with every charm, it is the same
instinct of self-consciousness in a victorious mood. They are on the
offensive then and more or less irresistible. For men certainly are
more easily attracted by the self-conscious woman, whether she is
shrinkingly or boldly so, than they are by one who sleeps soundly
unmindful of them and who goes about her business the next day with no
animated sense of them.

What I mean is that modesty of this kind is the fine art of
self-consciousness, and to be without it is to be femininely stupid,
no matter how much other sense you have. At my age, I suppose no woman
with a proper sense of dignity would want romantic attention. It would
come to the same thing as being caricatured. Even at that, I do get
tired sometimes of seeing in every man’s eye with whom I deal that I
have come to do business with him or that he has come to do business
with me. I feel the need of a little more versatility of manners
between us. I should like to take a pleasant feminine shot at him as I
see other women do, but so far as I know I have never capered one such
glancing remark at a man, even if I met him upon my own copygrounds,
much less in a business way. And I have wished for compliments, not
aimed at my brains or my diligence, as other women wish much more
fortunately, but no man ever lies in that beautiful way to me.

I am not regretting the dignity of my conduct, nor the awful dignity
with which I am treated; but I am merely intimating that it is dry
stuff being a woman when some dull wisdom in you keeps you from acting
altogether like one. It is a tearful thing to know that you will go
down to your grave loved and honored for the good you have done and not
for the sweetness and loveliness of the woman you were or might, could
or would have been if you had used your mind less and your talents more.

It would be interesting to know how the modern woman is coming out at
this point. They are bolder than we were. I read of one lately who left
her husband listening on the front porch while she went back in the
dark house and shot the burglar whom he was too sensible to face. And
it is absolutely amazing to me how many of them kill their own husbands
upon provocations that formerly drew only a few tears from a wife. To
slay your husband, no matter what kind of husband he is, seems to me a
frightful kind of suicide. Formerly only men killed their wives. Now
they flunk and desert them. They have lost some power of endurance they
used to have with all their faults in the married relation. As near as
I can make out, two people who marry now are not one in the sense we
used to be, because from the start they contemplate no such involving
unity. We are founding a precarious domestic life upon the grounds of
mutual intolerance.

I do not know how they have managed it, but it is perfectly clear to
an observing person that modern men are shy of modern women not as
fellow sports but as prospective husbands. Maybe it is because so many
women sue for alimony, when they used to give up and do the best they
could according to their marriage vows. Maybe it is because so many
young women now will bring suit for damages on account of a breach of
promise and prove the latter by the signature of a love letter.

In my day, if a girl was jilted she died of a broken heart, or became
an old maid, or married better, and nothing was said of that earlier
affair. Getting damages evens matters up, but it does seem strangely
gross and unwomanly to do such a thing, as if the victoress sold her
self-respect in the open court for so many thousand dollars. Can the
definition of self-respect change with the changing times with a woman?
I have often wondered how they feel when they win such a suit.

The effect of all this courage in women is to develop the bump of
matrimonial caution in the best men to the point of absurdity. I
remember very well the first hero we had in American fiction who dared
not write letters like Saint Paul, with his own hand, to his lady love,
lest these should be used as evidence against him. This was Annixter
in Frank Norris’s novel, ‘The Octopus.’ We thought at the time that
this was a false note in the story. Now the world is teeming with these
discreet young bachelors.

The fashion of what we are is changing. Women do seem to have a better
working knowledge of men than they had even a dozen years ago. But I am
wondering how it will turn out. If you are by nature the weaker vessel,
it is a dangerous thing to break too many of the stronger vessels. We
need them. The safest and wisest way of getting the better of a man if
you are a woman is by sticking to him.




XLIII

MERE MIND


The trouble is that I have been too much concerned in writing the
scriptures of human hearts according to the light of my own heart.
One cannot be such an interpreter and figure at the same time as the
sophisticated heroine of an adventurous and highly colored existence.
Will no one appreciate the delicacy and courtesy I have shown in
failing to reveal his sins by not recording mine? Then, indeed, I
should deserve the charge of having lived a particularly narrow and
uninteresting life.

No one will bury me on top of a high mountain in honor of my brilliant
transgressions or make a pilgrimage to lay wreaths upon my tomb later.
Any respectable person could commit them and get away with it. I have
a temper which perpetually glows like a coal of fire on my altar. The
lies I tell as a rule are good little lies offered to comfort somebody,
or to shield myself from the snooping eye of the uncharitable. I have
no more conscience about that than softly closing the door of my
chamber when the devil passes by.

I am an ungodly, intemperate and uncharitable woman when it comes
to bearing with laziness and shiftlessness. I still believe an idle
brain is the devil’s workshop. If I exposed some of the convictions
I entertain along this line, they would forever bar me from polite
society. I am so profoundly conscious of my own sex that I cannot
endure the license of modern conversation on this subject. Not only
that, but I am so mean-minded that I cannot believe the people who
indulge in it have decent minds, no matter how high and noble they look
at the time or what excellent diction they use.

I believe firmly in the fig leaves of language and that God still walks
in the garden in the cool of the evening, looking for that damned Adam
of us all. I believe the mere minds we have lead to mischief. They are
roguish and unscrupulous. I believe that we are in touch with something
else, spirit, which leads to righteousness, honor, and things of good
report. I am not pretending, however, to keep up this connection.

Just let me make a good resolution, especially to the effect that I
will exercise charity toward all and malice toward none, and I am sure
to fly off the handle before that day is done to administer mortal
justice merely, you may say, as a public service against a neighbor who
has cheated, or beaten his horse unmercifully, or started a scandal, or
gone a-fishing while his wife and children remain at home to work in
the fields--none of which is my business. Still, I will attend to it as
if it was.

I have long since made up my mind that there is more mortal relief in
judging people and taking the consequences of having the same judgment
meted to me again than sitting like an innocuous saint with my mouth
shut. If that scripture should be literally and universally obeyed, how
could we develop public opinion? And after all is said and done in
the name of the law and religion, does not public opinion remain the
strongest moral force we have for controlling the conduct of men?

I may be a trifle short now and then in my contributions to charity,
but no one can accuse me of not being liberal and constant in my
contributions to public opinion. The result is that, so far as I know,
I have one of the worst-weathered reputations in this section. I am
coming to that presently. In the meantime, if you take my word for it,
there is nothing novel or inflammable in the sins I have committed.

I am not excusing myself for the lack of valor I have shown along this
line, you understand; but I am offering an explanation, which relieves
me in a large measure both from blame or praise in this matter. When
you have had the Ten Commandments striped upon your conscience with
a switch at a tender age, when you have spent nearly a quarter of a
century practicing the beatitudes in spite of your own carnal desire to
raise the dust occasionally with an instinct more effective in mortal
affairs than a beatitude, and when you have spent the remaining years
of your life serving a sentence to hard labor, a flirtation seems
a frivolous waste of time, even if such an affair affords you the
gratification of being a worldly wise and tragically experienced woman.

I have contemplated this kind of diversion much as one considers a wild
speculation; but after mature reflection I have always decided not to
invest, because it seems to me the man gets the diversion and the
woman gets the black eye, no matter how sweetly and beautifully and
modestly she conducts her romance, especially if it ends in marriage.

What I mean is that it is useless to pretend to be very good or very
wise. We cannot be, and overcome one another as frequently as we do
in the long competition of living. I suppose this is one reason why
righteousness and wisdom make such slow progress in this world and have
had so many backsets. The sensible thing to do is to choose a life
within your capacity to achieve and do most of your thinking along the
line you have chosen.

So I have gone on, writing a few books on the side, but laying the
scenes of my mind in the valley. I can go out any day and trace my
real thoughts for the last ten years. By the looks of them it is easy
to infer that I have no great mind and not much money to spend. But it
is also clear that I was thinking and planning for happiness, not for
riches. The forests still stand taller and greener than when I came,
though the timber in them is worth three times as much as my whole
estate here. The red hillsides have been changed into green pastures.
It has been like taking over the care and maintenance of an old, sick,
and impoverished relative to restore the land to health and vitality.
But it is fertile and willing now. I make no apologies for what it has
cost. I have been too wise to keep books with Nature and the weather.
But I doubt if what I have spent in buildings, dams and breaks in all
this time equals what the average woman with the same income would have
spent on clothes, operas, motors and journeys from her favorite summer
resorts to her favorite winter resorts in half as many years. And I
still have my investments, while she must repeat her expenses each
season if she keeps up her indulgences. It all depends upon your taste
in living and your idea of pleasure whether you spend lavishly for the
splendors and gayeties of the fashionable world, or moderately for the
long peace of a quiet place, round quiet days and starlit nights.

I do not appear to have been brilliant or very extravagant anywhere;
but the only place where I fail to show at a modest advantage is on the
banks of the creek which flows through this valley, gory with mud in
the spring and winter floods, clear and sparkling as a happy woman’s
eye at other seasons. Twice every year I contend with this treacherous
watercourse, twice every year it rises and sweeps over the land.
Afterwards there remains not a vestige of my works along the banks to
restrain it.

Still, this valorous worm of a creek is near to being my dearest
possession. The time was when my heart was filled with anxieties
and fears for those whom I loved. Now there is no one to love and
nothing to fear. The time was when I was at grips with poverty and
every vicissitude. Now I am no longer very poor, and I do miss my
vicissitudes as a demoted soldier misses his decorations for gallant
service. And there was a time when the world inside the Church was
fiercely critical of me and my works. Now the weather has changed and
I miss the lash of the harsher saints. But I have a happy presentiment
that when all my works are finished, and I am a memory grown faint
in the minds of men, I shall still be an aged willful woman in this
valley, prancing majestically back and forth along the banks of this
creek, ordering fortifications raised against its violence. The world
will have passed and I shall have been reduced to littleness of
consequences there; but I shall have something to do, one last fight to
win. This is something to which to look forward when you have nothing
else to win.

This record, as truthful as I can make it, must read like a very
well-constructed plan for a kind of happiness suitable for a person
of my age and gender. But looking back through these years, I cannot
recall any such experiences. It seems to me that I have always been
in an anguish of labor or in a state of suspense, always looking for
more burdens to bear, giving more bonds for title to my own life and
liberties. It may be that happiness is a state of unconsciousness, and
that I have been too consciously looking for it; but I am beginning to
have a faint spiritual intimation that I have practiced my Scriptures
to the wrong tune. I am not so sure now that the key-note of a good
life should be self-sacrifice.

I am finally beginning to believe that the Scriptures were meant to
preserve us from too many awful sacrifices, and that I may have used
them too much like the shroud of my mortal mind. I am ready to concede
that Nature is full of tricks to serve its own ends; but it does seem
beneath the dignity of the good God to have persuaded the simple
minority to sacrifice themselves for the profit and comfort of the
indifferent and unrighteous majority, which is precisely what happens.
It is really written that we shall present ourselves living sacrifices
wholly acceptable to God.

I wish I had remembered and understood the meaning of that passage
sooner. It would have saved me much hardship and left more space for
human happiness. It comes to me now that it is less exhausting to make
one’s self wholly acceptable to the Lord than to those of our fellow
men who can fish for our services with these Scriptures. For they want
as many sacrifices as you can make, and will give you as many of their
burdens to bear as you will carry; but our heavenly Father only demands
a right spirit toward Him to make us reasonably safe in our relations
to our fellow men--which would by no means cover the terrific labors
and sacrifices some of us have made along this line.

I am coming now to the closing scenes of my life as I have lived it in
the past, because I mean to close these scenes. As a Christian, I have
had the wrong training; as a middle-aged woman, it will be difficult
to go against this training; but I do hope to have time to make the
experiment.




XLIV

ISN’T LIFE EXCITING ENOUGH?


Why should one take to strong drink because this is now a fashionable
perversity practiced against the prohibition amendment, as ill-bred
people disregard other people’s respect for law and decency? We
depend too much upon artificial stimulation. There used to be a
home-brew known as fine conversation which was much more delightfully
intoxicating than any brand of bootleg liquor now known to polite
society. Lacking conversation here, I have frequently risen to a state
of happy inebriation by following a particularly entrancing train of
thought.

This is one thing I have observed about gambling--it renders a man
or a woman sinister and silent when other people present are obvious
and vocative. They are mortgaged mentally by a fixed idea. In this
connection I recall a visit made years ago to Monte Carlo. I missed the
thrill. All my life I have been such a desperate gambler against fate,
adversity, and the weather that the games I saw played there seemed
childishly inadequate so far as gratifying an adventurous spirit is
concerned. Men and women simply pawned themselves for a little gold,
lost it or doubled it in a moment, and then repeated the experiment
indefinitely. My notion about such people is that they lack the courage
to sit in the long game of life and play it according to the rules.

I am something of a piker, financially speaking; but I have always
entertained the conceit that I might have done very well in Wall Street
if I had not been more profitably engaged. My dealings have been
chiefly with the earth and editors. Both are frightful risks. A flood
or a drought may destroy your harvest. The forensic mind of the editor
may have changed while you are writing the thing he thought he wanted,
or you may have missed your cue and produced something he never dreamed
of. My rule is never to kick against the pricks. What is the use of
adding wounds to your misfortune, because if you push one of them he
can give you reasons frightfully diminishing to your vanity for turning
down your copy. They are the most convincing men on earth at that
business.

I recall only one triumphant exception in my twenty-five years’
experience with them. In 1915 I had a contract to deliver three
short stories to be published in a New York magazine. When they were
delivered, the editor wired me that he would take them, since he was
obliged to do so under the terms of the contract, but that he did not
want them. The implication was not complimentary. Two days later I
arrived in New York, called the editor of another magazine and offered
him the same stories at an advance of two hundred dollars each on the
original price. He agreed to take them sight unseen. I hurried off to
call on the other editor who held the manuscripts.

He was astonished, and obviously not glad to see me. But my manner
was so regretful and apologetic that he recovered his more vehement
faculties at once. Never have I heard such a scathing criticism of
literary composition. But I let him do his worst; I urged him on to
speak yet more contemptuously of the things until words failed him.

I do not remember ever feeling meek in the presence of mere man, but
any woman can look meek. I folded my hands and regarded him like a
shorn lamb in a cold wind.

He accepted the compliment and relaxed. He said he regretted the
necessity of being perfectly frank, but he thought under the
circumstances it was his privilege to tell the truth about those
stories. He was willing to keep the things, but they were not worth
the price he had promised to pay for them, and so on and so forth. Oh,
certainly not, I agreed; they were not worth anything to him, but to
me, everything. My honor was involved; I could not think of allowing
him to keep them, and so on and so forth, in a sad, low tone.

This contest lasted an hour before I was at last obliged to fling off
my sheep’s clothing, give him a glint of my real mind and demand them.
He yielded then only on condition that I send him another story within
the year. I agreed on condition that he should pay for it at once in
advance, for no other reason that I can think of than to see how far I
could go, seeing that I had started so glibly on this adventure.

I delivered the three condemned stories to the other editor, having
told him the scandal connected with them, and returned to my hotel with
checks amounting to nearly four thousand dollars.

This indicates that I have some natural talent for speculating, but I
am thinking my career as a writer has lasted longer because I have had
the shrewdness not to develop the gift.

There is a wideness of the mind not dependent upon the experience of
a broad manner of living, if you know what I mean. But let that go;
I suppose after all is said that can be said one way or the other, a
man’s point of view about such matters depends upon his quality and
his taste. Many people mistake jazz for joy, a loose life for a full
life, successful selfishness for the survival of the fittest and the
rationalism of a dirt dauber’s intellect for wisdom. Mine tend toward
the great simplicities, whether they are actually to be attained or
not. I prefer to clothe my egotism according to the nobler scriptures
defining immortality rather than in the less expensive worldly vanities.

This is a mean advantage to take of those critics who lack the spunk of
such divine egotism without ever being able to prove immortality is an
illusion of the mortal mind inspired by the fear of death. I have my
anxieties about the traveling passports of saints in the next world;
but if it is possible to obtain a furlough from paradise, I shall apply
for one as soon as I am incorruptible and spirit-proved, return to this
world and pinch a few friends and critics who now look askance upon my
professions of faith. If I shall have developed no more than one wing,
I mean to spread it in a smile, rustle it triumphantly in their ears by
way of whispering, ‘Thou fool!’ But I do not suppose this will make any
difference. It has already been written and proved that ‘even if one
rose from the dead’ they will not believe.

So my years have gone by. If you have read this record so far you will
have perceived that these last ones lack the glory and loveliness
of those earlier years. I am better known in the world and not so
dependent in spirit as I used to be upon the angels in Heaven. I have
not outgrown their ministrations; I seem to have lost them. Sometimes
at night in this lonely house, lying awake, I remember the child I used
to be in the little room at home, when I literally believed in my own
guardian angels, one at the head and one at the foot of my bed.

What sublime experiences children have, and how serenely they accept
them! I used to fall asleep nonchalantly conscious of these angels and
their protection. Now if for one fleeting moment I could be aware of
such hallowed companionship, I am certain my corruption would put on
incorruption and I should rise from that bed a spiritual body. I should
be young and lovely; and the next morning, though I might look the
same, I should be changed. I should have the heart of a child, know no
evil, believe everything and draw all men to me.

Very few people enjoy the privilege of laying the scenes of their own
minds. They are controlled by circumstances, conventions, and that
windy weather of other people’s minds known as the spirit of the times.
If a man conceives the ambition to do such a thing, the easiest way is
to climb into an attic, close the door and write out the scenes of his
mind on paper. And this is pure fiction so far as he is concerned,
even if he produces a volume of the profoundest philosophy. He has not
lived it; he has merely thought it.

This is the reason why I have never bowed my dizzy old head to the
greatest thinker of them all. I have done too much active living
between the devil and the deep blue sea to be petrified into a state of
admiration by a mere system of thought. Let him try out his theories
on the land, in the street, in the commercial or industrial world, in
society, even in the Church, and find out how long they will last.

But watch the philosopher! He keeps out of the ructions of real life,
which is the only personal evidence he shows of being one. All that
stuff he has written is for you to practice. I never heard of an
up-and-doing ubiquitous philosopher. He may lecture, but he does not
live; he only exists. His books are popular or unpopular, but the man
as a man would prove ineffective if he should be put to the tests
the simplest of us must pass in order to matriculate as serviceable
scholars in the real arts of living. I should be willing to match one
of my narrow circuit rider’s days in living, or a half of one of my
own days spent in this green attic of the hills, with one of Herbert
Spencer’s days anytime; not that I know his private life, but I have
my suspicions that there was not much of it. He was too entirely
absorbed in recording his ideas to have had the energy and initiative
to dramatize his thinking into deeds.

The more one reflects upon the business rather than the theories of
living, the more do creeds and philosophies shrink in importance. It
is like starting on a long and arduous journey burdened with luggage.
You are handicapped by too many doctrines and complicated systems of
thinking, which interferes with that moral elasticity so essential to
courage and a good conscience. You may become famous for your piety
or your wisdom, but you do not arrive. Respect for a doctrine or
for logic trips you at the very moment when you might have made the
grade. You may found a transient school of thought, obtain the flighty
tail of a following; but there is no profit beyond that of gratified
vanity in such an adventure. The world will presently swing through
the lightening dust of your great mind and go on its way as if you had
never happened--as this earth would scarcely be spattered by radiance
if it passed through the flame tail of the brightest comet.




XLV

AS WE SEEM TO OTHERS


It is a queer experience to gaze into the crystal ball that your mind
really is and behold there the image of the woman you were and are
and ever shall be, in spite of everything you have done and can do to
glorify her.

The life you live never reveals the person you are by nature; only the
kind of person you have drifted into being or have been constrained
to become. So your autobiography, however intimately written, is not
the record of you, but of your feelings and performances under the
circumstances, what happened to you by the day or by the year; what
you lost and what you won. All of it is history manufactured by you in
living, but not you. Some luminous dust of your trials and triumphs
obscures your vision and makes the record shine at a time when no one
who knew you then noticed the faintest rim of a halo above you.

It is your nature to put your best foot foremost if you can get so much
as the toe of it in print, so you instinctively drop the curtain on
this scene or that one in your life because one hint of it would give
the reader a glimpse of you, not garnished for the moment by your good
deeds or extolled by your rhetoric of these performances.

I do not suppose any one who reads ‘My Book and Heart’ will ever
suspect what a commonplace person the author of that record really is.
I was frequently moved to tears and laughter while I was writing the
thing. Sometimes for whole days I felt translated into the good words
and the noble ones I used to set down merely the things I had suffered
and achieved.

But you have only to observe the impression you are making upon the
people who see you every day and know your literal expression, your
disposition, the cut of your eye, to have the soaring wings of your
vanity as an autobiographer clipped. Very few of us would recognize one
another by our scriptures, but we do it by the personal impression we
make. For example, I have never felt that I should have been personally
attracted to George Washington, although I respect and admire him as
the Father of his Country. I do not think I would have invited him to
a dinner party at my house even if I had been in a position to do so,
because I have a very strong feeling that he would have been a short
circuit socially. The conversation would have had to be adjusted to
him. Our minds would have had to be the obsequious footmen to his
outrageously noble soul. I do not believe tradition is responsible for
this notion I have of him, but some intuition of the man which not even
history can obscure.

On the other hand, I have a vaguely regretful feeling that I might have
enjoyed dining with Abraham Lincoln. And I am certain that I should
have felt comfortable and blessed on merely the rim of the presence of
Robert E. Lee. He would not have missed me even if I had been a very
plain and undistinguished person in the darkest corner of the room. He
would have contributed a glance of simple human recognition. I have
the feeling that if I looked very insignificant he might have made the
space between us with a fine complimentary air of having just seen some
one with whom he particularly wished to pass a few pleasant words. I
have had that happen to me more than once in the course of my life.

When you have never learned to sit gracefully like a lady lyre in your
chair with your draperies drawn close at exactly the right place; when
you have a motionless countenance socially and a blunder-buss mind, and
you are kept busy putting out the fuse of it lest the thing should go
off with the explosion of an idea too loud for such an occasion--I do
not know of any more gratifying experience than to be suddenly soothed
by the recognition of a truly great man or woman who apparently does
not suspect what an awkward person you are in that company. Such people
are never moved by mere manners; they perform an act of social piety to
you which springs from the gallantry of a kind heart.

I remember once, before I ever dreamed of such an extravagance as an
afternoon frock, I received an invitation to a very fashionable garden
party. I wore a shirt waist and skirt. The latter was long and trailed,
I hoped, elegantly behind me. But getting my foot caught in it as I
descended caused me actually to tumble from the hack in which I arrived
directly upon the fluttering edge of that garden party.

This was an abrupt way of entering the social life of a large town
where I had been a stranger for seven years. But I made it, due
entirely to one circumstance. A lovely woman, distinguished for her
social graces, caught sight of me sitting upon a bench pathetically
removed from the gayety of the occasion. She said she had been looking
for me. Had I had any punch? Innocent stuff, a kind of sublimated
lemonade. Did I know many of these people?

I had had no refreshment, and I did not know any of these people. I
might have added that my knees were still trembling from having fallen
out of the hack, but I made out to accompany her. It was like walking
in a rainbow of smiles and good will. Presently I came to my other
self, a woman I had never been before, a social creature at ease. I had
liberty, and remembered making several bright remarks, not droll, but
neatly and prettily funny, at which every one laughed and looked at me
as if I were a pleasant surprise.

I caught the tune, even the step, of that occasion. I remember mincing
from one group to another, holding up my skirt with an air, as
conscious of the lace in the frill of my petticoat as any other woman
present was of her rustling silk petticoats, accompanied through the
whole afternoon by that gracious woman who anchored me with a look or
a smile until my poor tight-fitting lid as a preacher’s wife came off
and I was near to being a song which was not a hymn. I may have been
ridiculous for all I know, but I felt very light in my heart. Maybe
this was happiness. If so, it was a long time ago, and I am by social
functions now as literary critics are by a new novel. I am too learned
in the things; I know too much about how they are made and what they
cost in jealousies and competitions to enjoy them as I did that first
garden party I attended in Nashville so many years ago.

But what I started out to prove was that as one person to another
person we are not the same character as we seem to be in history or
even a conscientiously written autobiography.

After the publication of ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife,’ my attributes as a
good Christian woman were severely damaged by some of the whispering
brethren. Quite inadvertently, the records of that book reflected
upon a few of the inside workings of the Church; and Lundy being
so tragically dead, these brethren dared not defend themselves by
attacking his memory. The only thing left to do was to discredit the
witness who had given damaging testimony concerning these matters.

This was how I lost my reputation the first time--an entirely
satisfactory item of expense to me so long as the crown I had written
above Lundy’s head had remained untarnished.

I kept silence, not by way of turning the other cheek, which is a form
of piety unsuited to my disposition; but looking back now, I believe I
was thinking out a few Scriptures. When you have nothing to lose you
have everything to gain. I was in this grand state of destitution at
that time. I had lost my husband; I had also lost my reputation under
the same frightful circumstances. But the moment I began to revolve
that excellent Scripture in my mind which says, ‘Judge not ... for
with what judgment ye judge ... it shall be measured to you again,’ I
began to perk up. I had been most unmercifully judged, and here was the
Lord’s own permission to return the compliment.

I had several million readers by this time, which was considerable
advantage to have gained in the scrimmage. I wrote three more
circuit-rider stories. Besides having struck a rich vein of the finest
human nature, I may have been inspired by some retributive sense of
justice, according to the Scripture quoted above. Certainly my motive
was not without mortal guile to guide it. But I have known very few
effective people who stuck themselves up with a noble motive under
fire. My idea is to whip, even if you perish in the fight. I am always
willing to perish, knowing well that I shall rise again every time,
everywhere according to the Word; but I am teetotally opposed to being
defeated. If you do not take too many of the meeker Scriptures without
balancing them with the fiercer elder Scriptures, it will be perfectly
apparent to any sensible person that the Lord does not sanction
submission to any unfriendly fate.

I stuck to my text honorably, however, and confined my revealing wit to
certain regrettable methods in the government of our church, and I may
have touched lightly upon one or two doctrines which I believed to have
been doubtfully derived from the Word. But no man’s reputation suffered
in these stories as mine had suffered at the hands of some of the
brethren.

Strange as it may seem, my reputation began to improve in the churchly
silence which followed the publication of these later stories. I do
not know whether I have reëstablished some kind of pop-eyed confidence
in my own piety and character, or if I have been merely forgiven. I
remain warily and politely on the outside, not knowing what service I
yet may be inspired to render this church, which is infinitely dear
to me. But I have been comforted with the hope that it has grown more
tolerant of me, as I have become less intolerant of its shortcomings. I
am beginning to realize how difficult it is to maintain any Christian
organization in a world which specializes in worldly values without
using secular methods. More courage and more faith are needed than
modern Christians seem to have in order to comprehend that the glory of
a church does not consist in its wealth and earthly power, but that God
alone is the glory of the Church. I have a feeling that if Jesus should
suddenly appear among us, clothed once more in our minds with divine
authority, He would say to all these churches of whatever denomination,
‘Sell all thou hast and follow me.’

It depends upon where you lay your scenes in living what kind of
reputation you get, and how you lose it, in case that happens. If
you lay them like a good little Dorcas, in the church, somebody will
defeat you for the presidency of the missionary society because you
are the most efficient woman for that place. If you stretch them like
a climbing Jacobess in women’s clubs, a certain clique in that club
will pull the social ladder from under your aspiring feet and elect
you to the office of kitchen manager for the afternoon refreshments.
If you move a trifle briskly in smart society, you are in danger of
losing your reputation on the front page of the daily paper on account
of having done something newsy the night before the morning after. I
know a splendid old gray-haired widow who will not dim the snap in her
fine eyes, nor break her habit of having small feet beautifully shod,
nor even change the contours of a figure outrageously youthful for her
years. One morning this summer she appeared in the striding togs of a
smart lady pedestrian and stepped vigorously past a dear friend on her
way out.

‘Where are you going?’ the dear friend called out.

‘For my morning walk,’ she returned, swinging youthfully down the steps
into the street.

‘She is doing nothing of the kind. She is going to meet a man!’ the
friend informed me.

‘At her age?’ I protested.

‘Age has nothing to do with her. She has resigned from her last ten
years,’ was the indignant retort.

‘Still, at this innocent and halcyon hour of a summer morning, a man
cannot be such a doubtful person to meet,’ I suggested.

The sense of sex has changed its location. It no longer exists merely
as a sacred natural instinct, but it has become a conversational
feature of the modern mind, leading to the wildest social and
intellectual speculations. And there is literally no way of escaping
its damaging enterprises.

In any case, if you retain the delicacy of your sensibilities, it is
difficult to determine which is the more embarrassing--to have lost the
reputation you were so careful to make for yourself or to endure the
one imposed upon you by others.

This is precisely what has happened to me. Somewhere along the way
during these last ten years I have lost my reputation again. A second
growth, to be sure, but one which I fondly believed to be normal and
more becoming to me than the one I lost to the brethren. And not enough
time left to build up another one before I pass forever out of the zone
where all earthly reputations are made!

Imagine the situation--an elderly woman who discreetly retired from the
world years ago to spend the remainder of her days in a remote place,
basking in the grace of God without making a fuss about it; showing
her head once in so often above the horizon with a few neat laurels
on her brow; doing a little good here and there, giving herself the
airs of a beloved woman--only suddenly to awaken to the realization
that she is a terrible old woman, autocratic, overbearing, who has
set up a very small but clearly visible empire over which she reigns
regardless of the manners, customs, and convictions of her friends and
neighbors--when all this time I thought I was minding my own business
and dressing my own garden to the profit and delectation of everybody
who passed by!

These dear good people have been speculating in my attributes, revising
them privately according to their amazingly vigorous but uncouth
imaginations. They have not left one pretty soft feminine sin sticking
to me. If I had entered one of the modern professions of banditry or
bootlegging, I should have needed less courage than would be required
to play the rôle assigned to me. It calls for buckram breeches, two
guns, a club and the vocabulary of a sailor on shore leave. The news of
my deeds in this amazing disguise have percolated far and near.

We are hard to please. I have frequently pitied women who were
criticized for the way they dressed, rouged, or smiled, not knowing how
vulnerable many people are to vivid coloring and a Mona Lisa sweetness
of expression. Now I could find it in my heart to envy them. It is less
embarrassing to be so suspected than to be shorn of one’s dearer charms
and vanities as a woman, and to be accused instead of setting upon
strong men with sticks. You wonder painfully if you actually have faded
and toughened so much in the estimation of your neighbors that you have
passed beyond the pink and glorified pale of a more delicate feminine
transgression.

Mrs. Virginia Woolf, novelist and critic, recently made this statement
in an article published in the ‘Criterion’: ‘On or about December,
1910, human character changed.’ One must envy her perspicuity,
even if she does not mention the exact day of the month when this
transformation took place; but I cannot imitate it about so intimate
a thing as my own reputation. I do not know how long this primitive
artistry in changing it has been going on; but my suspicion is that it
began the day I set foot in this valley and started spinning literary
rainbows above the heads of these simple folk who share the attic life
of these simple hills with me.

Six busy years passed in love and charity with them before I had the
least hint of what was going on. When at last I came face to face with
my local likeness I was confounded. Long afterward the explanation
occurred to me--in dealing with other people it is a mistake not to
take into account the furtiveness of human nature and the guarded
indirectness of the mortal mind. Wearing creeds and civilization like
garments, we still practice within many of the traits of our primitive
ancestors. A man is frequently on guard or on the offensive when we
approach him in a friendly tail-wagging spirit, all unconscious of his
bristling attitude, due to some weakness in himself of which you are
not aware, or to a competitive animosity which you do not feel.

I have learned this too late in life to practice a corresponding
discretion in my association with other people. I seem to have an
infernal gift for telling what is going on in my mind or feelings. This
is the quickest way possible to kick the skylights out of your own
reputation. But I do not regret it, having had a grander time telling
on myself than most people ever have concealing themselves. I have told
the truth too much. It makes you free, but you pay for it. I remember
hoping at the time that the scandalous caricature of my virtues might
be a compliment inadvertently implied. One must protect himself before
his immediate public either with conceit or with resignation. I use
both as the occasion demands.

After this experience, I resolved to have done with my various
reputations. They are nowhere required of us in the Scriptures. On the
contrary, in the second chapter of Philippians, it is recorded that
he ‘made himself of no reputation.’ I have willed mine to the world,
which makes them and takes them away. They are too ephemeral and too
expensive to keep up. If you have caught the wind of the world in your
sails, you have only to do your work to insure your fame--a drastic
business, but not nearly so difficult as maintaining your own personal
reputation if you have become one of the assets of the public mind.

Besides, the older you grow the less comfortably does any reputation
fit you. It is like a garment you used to wear, now out of style with
your thoughts and your aspirations, which are stretching away like
dreams beyond the mind of this world. There was a time, for example,
when it troubled me to be regarded as a tightwad, because instead of
contributing in the conventional public-spirited manner to movements,
memorials, monuments and notorious charities, I have done my alms in
secret. And though my heavenly Father who seeth in secret has not
yet seen fit to reward me openly as they are praised who do good
accompanied by a press agent, I am beginning to feel more solvent
morally and independent spiritually by disregarding these character
prints, good or bad, left in passing upon the minds of other people.
The image depends too much upon the quality of the mind that receives
it to be always reputable or veracious.

But whenever you become truly philosophical, you never are quite
truthful toward your own humanness. I may write convincingly concerning
this noble ideal of myself. It is held, you may say, on principle; I
have never been able to live up to it except by fits and starts. The
fact remains that I frequently suffer like a sinner under conviction
over the impression made upon a friend, knowing how I have touched up
the crooked lines of his character so that it will shine in a sentence
more becoming to him. When he reads this sentence later in the book,
he never seems to recognize himself. He never comes to clasp me by the
hand and regard me with tear-dimmed eyes of appreciation. But just let
me write out a fault, and forty men and women of my acquaintance will
take offense, when my innocent purpose had been to dramatize one of my
own secret shortcomings!

The greatest inconvenience I experience comes from the constant effort
to repress my friendly instincts. I have a talent for loving people
and would like to use it, but my flare of affection is put out when
I perceive myself mirrored in the eye of that man or this woman as a
fearsome person, liable to explode an opinion which will reflect upon
his dearest prejudice or outrage her most sacred fallacy.

I am not complaining, you understand; I am simply indicating how much
worm-and-dust wisdom of this world is required to finance a reputation
even for sweetness and light, and that it does not pay if you have any
safer way of employing your talents.

We permit conscience to make cowards of us all. Then by instinct we
turn upon the highest everywhere to reduce it to the level of our own
conduct. We cannot even get far enough away from our own transgressions
to believe in the Almighty. We condemn ourselves to dust and despair,
and we cover the whole ignoble performance with flubdub philosophy and
think we get away with it. But we do not. We live best by faith, not
by what we know or the uttermost that we can think; and certainly not
according to our reputations, because very few people know what kind of
reputations they have.




XLVI

FITTING INTO LIFE


Growing up year after year in a place like this requires more studious
application than taking a master’s degree in a university, where
you attend lectures and have a course of reading to defend you from
thinking your own thoughts on that subject. It is a fact which you
discover for yourself under the circumstances that ‘knowledge comes,
but wisdom lingers.’ We are at best no more than the imitators of
wisdom. We borrow it, show off in it; but I have yet to see the
faintest trace of natural wisdom in man, though the lower animals
seem gifted with enough of it not to worry about their fate, whatever
fate it is. I reckon this is the reason they remain lower, the damned
harnessed victims of their content, as we are the more aspiring victims
of our discontent, doubts and anxieties.

I do not think, for example, that a man ever lived who could have
conceived the idea of peace. That is something handed down to us by
inspiration and tradition from the great beginning. The Lord alone
knows what peace is, and He declared it--‘On earth peace, good will
toward men.’ We have been repeating that Scripture for ages as children
recite verses without the mind to comprehend the meaning. This is not
hypocrisy on our part; it is our very nature to be incapable of peace.

After a while you get to the clear place in mind where you can see
through so many theories and philosophies, even professions of faith,
you know that they are no more than the defenses we throw up against
our own weaknesses and fears. One of the touching revelations of this
kind to me has been the shrewd way we shift for ourselves at the very
last. We get a marvelous confidence in the goodness of God then. We
come clean and do see Him, whether we were ever before pure in heart or
not.

The last deathbed I attended was that of a notoriously wicked man. No
saint could have been more serenely at peace so far as his immortal
future was concerned. He had worked hard and sinned fiercely. No man,
it seemed, was his brother; but he lay there upon his dingy pillows
beneath his ragged quilt with the innocent eyes of a child. He had done
with guilt. He was out of pain so far as the Lord was concerned. Lying
so wanly weak, never again to move hand or foot, he assured me that
he was ready to go. The idea that he would be off presently upon an
immeasurable journey was fixed in his mind, accompanied by no fears.

They who stick to their creeds and the meaner mortal facts we all
produce in living cannot comprehend the courage of a man like this. In
considering his case they remember their favorite damnation doctrines,
but never their own transgressions. Nothing will convince them that the
Lord is not a theologian, but a Creator; and that a history of His will
would be a history of the one fundamental law, not as we understand
law, but what He has made it, followed whether you keep it or break it
by inevitable consequences.

This man had broken it in his flesh, and was dying for that reason as
surely as if he had cut himself down. But now he was forced at last to
keep that last most important part of it. With the vision of a child
he had learned the meaning of God. He rested serenely upon what we
preach and so rarely have the courage to achieve--real faith in God,
and it had turned out precisely as the Scriptures promise--eased him of
every fear. His sins had been removed as far from his consciousness as
presently his body would be. I felt very close and soothingly kin to
him, and reverently amazed at this perfect miracle of faith; also glad
that he would die and escape that pit of himself into which he surely
would have fallen if he had survived.

When you get far down your slope of time, however, and care less than
you used to care about being the heroine of your life dolled up in your
best deeds, then you can take a look at yourself according to the mind
you have now calmed and cooled by the years, and you may come into that
last and greatest of all vanities--the boldness to portray the person
you really are.

Most people think they do that when they confess their sins; the worse
they are the better they are for this purpose. My notion about that is
if you must boast, it is more polite to proclaim your virtues. I have
always been very courteous to others about that. But the queer thing
is that I have never felt that my virtues really belong to me. Lecky’s
‘History of European Morals’ knocked the last ray of conceit out of
me about being even a chaste woman. First one virtue and then another
seems to have been thrust upon us according to the self-protecting
instinct of men against frauds in paternity or some other economy for
their comfort and peace of mind.

I am not complaining, you understand. It has all turned out for the
best long ago; but I am just saying how queer I feel about having had
decency and honor thrust upon us like foreordination by men, instead
of choosing these distinctions for ourselves according to the word and
will of God as we think we do. I have wondered if other women feel
the same way about this. But I have never had the courage to ask the
question point-blank. I have a sort of premonition that most of us are
so ignorant of the processes by which we become virtue-bearing in an
unvirtuous world that almost any woman might resent the question.

But I suppose our sins do actually belong to us. However, there is
practically no originality about them. We can only commit two or three,
the others are mere variation of the same perversities. My notion is
that there is not much satisfaction to be had from exposing them. If
you make an art, a literature, or a science of your vices, the result
is some kind of puerile decadence, not entertaining to normal people.

In any case, I have been a very dull person along this line. To the
best of my knowledge I have never committed an interesting sin, nor one
that even held my own attention for longer than the moment it took to
get rid of it by prayer and repentance. For this reason I am obliged to
confine myself to the moderate activities of that narrow and monotonous
existence already mentioned with becoming heat in these pages.

Looking back now through the mirror of my mind, the thing that
astonishes me most is that nothing seems to have changed me. I made
my little history of courage, honor and sacrifices, and from start to
finish I can trace the silent, invincible child I was through all the
women I have become in various periods of my life. I lived the whole
of it with a curious mental reservation which was myself. I still
love with a stronger passion the things that child loved--the earth,
the sky, the living things that do not speak, but know and mean so
much more than we can think or even tell with all our living or dead
languages.

There is a speech in the wind that we do not know, a heroism in Nature
that we do not comprehend, some wisdom of beauty in the grass and
the faintest flowers that bloom which we shall never achieve, a kind
of fearless liberty to live to which we shall never attain with all
our ideals and declarations of independence. We only believe that
all men are created free and equal and entitled to the pursuit of
happiness, but it is something we have never experienced because our
minds constrain us. These verdant boughs have no mind, so they live
in perfect liberty without our poor fears and transient knowledges.
The seeds of the grass that is cut down and withers to-day will spring
green above our graves to-morrow with not one memory of pain or death.
As a child, I could not have said what drew me to the earth, but it
was this feeling of being closer there to life that neither fears nor
perishes.

I am poorer in faith than that child was, but I still believe wearily
in the same Providence in which she rejoiced. As she went silently
about her affairs regardless, so have I gone on doing the thing I
meant to do with a determination that will not be defeated. I made no
appearance at this business, and do not now attract the least attention
at working my will; only the thing accomplished is seen and read, not
me. What I mean is that I am literally an unobtrusive person by nature.
No one would recognize me except by name. I remember the same shyness
as a child at being noticed. I have played my little tunes on the heart
of the world, but I never craved to be identified by my strut with my
works.




XLVII

FACTS AND TRUTHS


I love truth, although I shall die hating mere facts, because they are
misleading. They are the weapons and defense of literalists, strangely
mean-minded people in my opinion who have caused much trouble and
strife in the world. But I have the same happy talent the child I was
had for prevaricating. Let me have some wisdom of the truth even if
it is no larger than a mustard seed and the sensation inflates me. I
cannot set it down in the little raw words of mere veracity. I must
garnish it and spread it like a rainbow above my mind.

Some people would call this lying. I think they have done it, but I am
not embarrassed or convinced. My notion is that it is a very precious
kind of inebriation of the spirit. I remember lying myself into a state
of happy intoxication as a child, even if I had to go out behind the
house to do it where no one could hear me. I think this is one reason
I live concealed behind so many hills now. The occasional excursions I
make into the world bring me face to face with so many confusing and
depressing facts which I cannot endure and cannot deny. Here, there is
nothing to deny. All is an affirmation of the old order of things as in
the beginning. It is only my mind that travels. Sometimes then I see
visions of the future like Cassandra. But I try to be sensible about
this and remember that it is the weariness of the years which darkens
the glass.

The world is not really whirling to destruction. It is we who are old
and no longer able to keep pace with the times and who must pass away.
Everything will go on as usual when we are out of it. And I shall not
be scared up out of my grave, disheveled and demented by the din of
some fearful battle going on above me. Such thoughts I do have for
the moment, and am mastered by them as I used to be enchanted when I
was young by a star-blossoming night. But presently I take a sort of
recumbent comfort in the situation; nothing is really changed that
should remain fixed by His almighty will--the same bright days, the
same kind nights, the same seasons; only I have grown older.

As to facts, I have always been a faithful interpreter of the truth
as my mind finds it; but I never have been able to stick to facts.
In my opinion they are among the most misleading things we have to
contend with in this present world. A fact is something somebody finds
out about you that is not true, one of those capital-letter deeds you
performed in a high mood or a low mood which is not characteristic of
the man you really are. Personally, I had much rather be judged by the
life I have lived than by the books I have written. In both places I
have said things or done things that outrage the fact-tacking genius of
critics. But on the whole I have come out very well.

My idea of Heaven is a place where there are no hard and fast facts of
mortality sticking to us, but we shall be what we really are, true
hearts at last, easy to know and easier to believe, no reasons left to
envy one another or to suspect one another. I have a faint impression
that this may reduce mental activity among us beyond endurance, but I
am willing to try it for a while.

I am not opposed to facts, you understand; but my point is that we
attach too much importance to them as evidence. Facts make war; they
are used by ambitious men and greedy men to sway the minds of people.
Does any one believe now that there would have been any Great War if
the common people who furnished the cannon fodder for it had known the
real truth underlying the conflict? I doubt it.

I should like to get back to that honest feline normalcy of being just
a woman with the ordinary exercise of my give-and-take disposition.
I would spare more time for living instead of working. I wish above
everything else to indulge more in inconsequential conversation about
just pleasant things. What has become of all the natural, cheerful
little topics we used to discuss? I rarely ever hear a conversation now
that does not turn out for the worst instead of ending in a gale of
laughter.

Am I wrong, or is there a note of sinister wisdom in laughter these
days? Is there some dreadful quality in the knowledge we are getting
which changes innocent merriment to cynical hysteria? I must be wrong
about this; but when you live alone most of the time, and only go
abroad occasionally in the world, you do notice things like that--the
eyes of people not so trustful of one another as I remember them long
ago, a fearful wit, and that queer triumphant note in laughter like a
comment indulged at the world’s expense.

I am merely setting down my thoughts about all this as one thrusts out
his hands in the dark and feels his way toward the door. What actually
happens is that I spend most of my days alone here in this cabin with a
companionable fire upon the hearth. Usually I get away with it; but if
I am in a particularly keen mood, the illusion fails. I know it is only
a bright combustion of heat and wood in the fireplace. No real sense
to the crackling of these blazing logs. I read some, walk abroad with
the dogs, and I have my usual look at the stars, as a poor lonesome
shepherd may watch his flock a long way off and beyond his reach, but
his sheep still. So are these stars mine. The heavens above this cabin
are familiar to me like a garment I have worn a long time upon my heart.

But I have never seen an angel ascending or descending! That keeps one
strained up too much--no respite from this business of believing what
you cannot see with the naked eye. I am not denying that it is good for
the soul, but sometimes I have wished for something that was just good
for me.




XLVIII

BOOKS: MY OWN AND OTHERS


When the harvests are in and all the summertime guests are gone and a
crisper, cooler silence begins to blow through this valley, I settle
down to a nine months’ stretch of living alone here in the best company
to be had. What I mean is that you can lay the book you are reading
on the shelf without being obliged to think about what you will serve
to the hero and heroine for dinner that evening. But after dinner you
can take it up again and resume your companionship with the author
and these characters which are frequently more interesting than real
people, because they are derived from human nature at large and are the
composites of many men and women. Also, there is the country in which
they live, which may be on the other side of the world from where you
live. So, sitting in your chair before your own fire, you enjoy all the
benefits of travel without the inconvenience and confusion.

To read any one of Balzac’s stories is like spending an evening in
France, even if you have never been in France and cannot pronounce one
single fluted word of that language. And to read Victor Hugo is like
spending one half the evening among the sobbing stars and the other
half of it amid scenes of the direst poverty made by the meanest minds.

Hugo was the dramatist of human emotions at their highest pitch
and lowest ebb. He had the gift of being vicariously sublime in
a character like that of the old communist or Jean Valjean, but I
doubt if he himself possessed the attributes of any kind of permanent
character. I have the feeling that he was an irresponsible person with
a histrionic conscience and practically no modesty of morals. Otherwise
it is not clear to me how we can account for the serial romances of his
own life, or his description of the Battle of Waterloo, or the fact
that he took his morning ablutions in a glass bathroom on top of his
house. The sun was, indeed, above him, but the populace was also in
attendance in the streets below.

As for Balzac, he was a literary comedian who handled the tragedies of
the human heart with a wit kin to the irony of fate. He could never
have interpreted any other people but the French. He is peculiar to
them, a medium through which the France of his day still lives, loves,
sins, and suffers with a charm and a talent for indecency which it
probably never had in reality. The art of a master is required to lift
the squalor of the lowest lives and the grandeur of the noblest lives
into imperishable scenes on paper, because in life they do change and
fade into forgetfulness.

I recall one of his heroines, a stupid moron who could impart no
animation to her immorality. He finds her reclining on a couch and
spends ten thousand words describing her figure. I can spend a
fascinating hour under that splendid spray of language, reading the
mind and nature of the author. There is something idiotic in French
genius of the first water like the artless simplicity of a defective
person going about with his clothing disarranged.

Before he has done making images of this woman she has ceased to exist
except as a feminine mollusk of beauty. Then I am invariably moved
to mirth by his efforts to get her off the couch and induce her to
say something or do something bad enough or sufficiently entrancing
to justify his description. Only an author who has struggled with a
stubborn or stupid character in a story can appreciate his dilemma,
and the fiasco when she finally sits up and sobs, with no visible
explanation of the sob. The reader is left in suspense until the next
chapter reveals the cause of her grief, which is not grief at all, but
the French hysteria of passion. It is clear to the envious like me that
he cannot bear to sacrifice one sentence of the marvelous description
he has written of her and that she can never measure up to it in actual
performance.

I remember having a similar experience years ago with one of my own
heroines who turned out to be another kind of fool. Nothing was further
from my expectations when I introduced her with a few complimentary
sentences. I must have got the idea from an old valentine card. Anyway,
she was standing beautifully gowned beside a tall fluted column on the
veranda of a magnificent old Southern mansion. I managed to give the
reader the impression that she was rich, handsome, thirty, not married
and vaguely unhappy.

She stood regarding the gently rolling landscape with this expression,
which was as far as my talents as a struggling literary genius could
carry her. I knew what would happen to her next day, but by no flight
of my imagination could I fathom the thoughts that should be passing
through her sad spinster mind at that moment. Neither could I move
her from her gracefully leaning pose against the column. She became
cataleptic. I labored with her frantically through three blistering hot
summer days without ever persuading her to so much as turn her head.

Finally, in desperation, I sent her an anonymous note by a messenger
couched in the language of a bold lover, saying that he would see
her presently and settle a few old scores. She had run through with
many lovers in her earlier youth, and could only perceive that the
chirography of this note was vaguely familiar. It was a disgraceful
thing to do, but the effect was electrical. From that time to the end
of the story I have never had a more elastic heroine. Every author
must have similar experiences, but very few of us would dare Balzac’s
insolence to the reader’s intelligence and get by with the performance.

Certain books are more interesting to read than others in a place
like this. There is nothing in the sublime propriety of these trees,
the wide skies above and this earth so innocently green below to
finance the erotic in fiction. It gives the impression of decadence
artificially conceived in circumstances so old and decent.

Scott’s novels go like a singing charm. So do Stevenson’s stories. And
it is the most pleasant place imaginable to read Addison’s papers. But
not Christopher North’s ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’; too much scholarly wit
flashing between North and his brilliant companions in these ambrosial
nights. My own experience is that, living alone with the stars by
night and with the hills by day, the mind of the heavens and the earth
overcome you and you cannot think of anything very smart or funny to
say to yourself. I have never understood that great man who went off
one summer, settled himself like a hermit in the midst of an immense
landscape and wrote an essay on the ‘Sense of Humor in Jesus.’ That
which always impressed me more about Jesus was his sense of man, who is
the tragic figure in all creation.

The one book stimulating beyond all others in a place like this is the
Bible. No matter how great a theologian a man may be, I doubt if he
could come anywhere near comprehending the wisdom and the majesty of
the thirty-eighth chapter of Job unless he has spent years in the wind
and weather of a quiet place.

‘Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this
that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

‘Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and
answer thou me.

‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if
thou have understanding.’

Job makes no reply.

‘Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath
stretched the line upon it?

‘Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the
cornerstone thereof;

‘When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted
for joy?’

Job remains silent.

‘Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had
issued out of the womb?

‘When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a
swaddling-band for it,

‘And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors,

‘And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy
proud waves be stayed?’

Job hangs his old gray head.

‘Hast thou commanded the morning since thy day; and caused the
dayspring to know his place;

‘That it might take hold of the ends of the earth--’

When you consider that these are the unthinkable thoughts of the
Almighty which must be delivered by the tongue of a mortal man and
that the trace of his emotion and simplicity run through them like a
weakness, it is amazing how near he caught the majesty and meaning of
what he had to tell. Nothing ever written compares with the last five
chapters of the Book of Job and the first five chapters of Genesis,
and the authors of these books were the popular writers of their day.
Compare their works with the works of modern poets, novelists, or
historians. Let any modern scientist answer the questions the Lord put
to Job, and observe how reduced in manner and substance his answers
are. He gets the stuff out of his mind, but these Scriptures were
blown across creation to the minds of the men who recorded them. They
have a roll and a rumble mortal intelligence can never impart, and they
contain more hints of scientific truth than the wisest among us have
found out, though they labor in that direction.

We are still wrinkling our noses and squinting through a telescope at
Mars, disputing about that one little bright speck in the heavens. If
this planet had been mentioned by a single prophet in the Bible, we
should know more about it than the astronomers will ever find out, just
as there is more information about creation as applied to this earth in
Genesis than has ever been translated into the terms of science.

I have long since accepted the heavens and the earth as a part of my
future scriptures and let it all go at that.

But what I am trying to do now is to indicate the way I have passed the
time for so many years in this quiet place. One cannot work all the
time, and I was never one of those worms that inhabit books written by
others. If it is a particularly entrancing tale, I close the book and
envy the author. I pace the floor and wring the neck of my spirit in
grief because I shall never write anything as good. There are stacks of
little ragged notebooks scattered in the dusty corners of this study
which carry the record of these idle hours. Rarely ever a diary note in
them of my own performances, but they contain studies of men and women.

At that hour of the evening when mother used to pick up her knitting
and pass into a peaceful trance of industry, I reach for one of these
headless blank books and write characters from memory. Maybe of one
dead long since, but I recall her with a comprehension I never had
when she was in the flesh. The copy she has left behind her is cleared
of the fog which living casts over us. Or it is of one whom I never
knew, but I have heard or read a news item concerning him which omits
every personal detail. I piece him together as you construct a mastodon
from the bones he left behind him. I have some grand portraits of the
prophets made this way, intimate and terrible like the Scriptures they
left behind them. Sometimes I get the whiff of a man’s reputation,
compare it with his deeds and deduce a character which is finer or
worse than either the one or the other. After this it is easy to draw
the features of his face, the length of his legs, the cut or sag of his
eye. Presently I have a hero or a knave put together, respiration as
good as Adam’s, who may come in handy for copy.

There is one whom I always wanted to put into a tale, but could never
set up a situation sufficiently noble and stupid to contain him. He
is old now and coming to his end; but in the days when I knew him
he was a great man who had no manner or sensibility about achieving
greatness--homely, with what you might call a country-town smile,
which is an expression of facial simplicity. He had a splendid figure
and wore his clothes as if he hated clothes. He walked as if he were
stepping over dead bodies. I do not know why, because he was by nature
singularly merciful. He worked indefatigably and rose to the top of his
profession without distinction.

This vicious stride he had was an offense his fellow men would not
forgive. His unpopularity was cumulative. He did not need to boast to
get it; he had only to be seen striding along the street to his office,
down the aisle of a church, or even as a pall-bearer at a funeral, to
add fury to these flames that never consumed him. He loved music and
had no talent for it, but he always kept mute musical instruments in
his house, as some people keep a Bible on the center table which they
do not read. He loved learning and had no learning, but he had the
finest private library in the city; not to show his friends, because he
had no friends, but probably by way of brushing shoulders with poets,
philosophers, and historians.

The queer thing was that he read these books, as you perform a wearying
task. Every evening for twenty years he would sit down in this library,
cross his legs, lean back like a tired man and get through as many
pages of a volume as he could endure before bedtime. He never referred
to this prodigious labor, and no one ever heard him quote an opinion
or passage from one of these books. He made his own opinions and
maintained them without citing authorities to uphold them.

I seem to have filled a notebook with speculations half touching, half
humorous, on the character of this man; but it appears from the record
that I could not determine whether he formed this habit of reading as a
lonely person sometimes plays solitaire to pass the time, or whether
it was a terrific duty he performed toward himself. In any case, I
record the sequel. He finally simmered down to silence and fishing. His
conscience was clear. He had read every volume in that populous library
and now reads no more.

Follows a very good paragraph on the quality of valor peculiar to noble
stupidity. It shows up cleaner than the makeshift courage of smarter
people. But I must have been by this man as Lundy used to be by the
great textbook he would write for teaching Greek. He had the idea, as
entrancing as any fiction could be, but he did not write the book. Such
a romance of the rudiments of a language was really beyond any man to
achieve. Just so, you will not find a trace of this valorous dunce so
carefully thought out in any story I have written. Evidently I could
not find the deeds to dramatize him.

Many writers probably practice their art in this manner, as those of
us who are not writers practice the oral art of gossiping. I have
sometimes wondered if an author’s sketchbook might not read better
than an artist’s sketchbook looks. But it is unusual to be reduced to
talking to yourself with a pen about people whom you have actually
known or suspected by way of entertainment.




XLIX

CHANGE AND CONFUSION


I suppose the shortening of human life is really a blessing. This may
be why so many men and women look forward to immortal life. That would
not only involve an incredible change of scenes but of conditions. We
should be relieved of both our virtues and vices, and that wearing
monitor inside, conscience; of appetites, indigestion and every other
vicissitude of the mortal mind and the mortal body. Certainly we do
tire of any existence we work out for ourselves if we keep an active
mind, because the mind no less than the spirit of man is migratory. So
he migrates, or endures all the hardships of a sabbatical year, or he
changes his business, or he retires from business. The point is that
we are made so that we cannot stay put, as the saying goes, without
disintegrating.

Lately I have contemplated the adventure of sailing forth into the
world as one goes to meet a good old comrade. But the more I think
about it, the more it seems to me that I might meet a stranger not
suitable to my years or habits of thought. The mind and character of
the world I knew has changed.

When I left it in 1912 to take up my residence in this valley, nearly
as many people in Nashville attended prayer meeting on Wednesday night
as went to the theater on other evenings. Now prayer meetings are about
to become obsolete. A popular preacher was a good pastor, but never the
sensational feature of the Sunday morning paper. The Methodist Church
had not lifted the ban on worldly amusements, and we had only a few
earthly amusements, like playing flinch and croquet. As a Church, it
was lenient toward penitents on principle, but not nearly so lenient
as it is now toward the world. Nobody would have dreamed of putting
on a drive for seventy-five million dollars for Christian education.
The price of salvation and education have advanced more than worldly
luxuries since then.

Women were still in hot pursuit of culture if they were particularly
worldly minded. Otherwise they were the handmaidens of the Lord as
usual. Polite social gambling was limited to a very small set, and was
not recognized as a respectable diversion. Now these same women are
citizens, politicians, and reformers. They have the same brains, the
same natures, the same nervous systems they have always had, which are
differently tempered from those of men; but they are running neck and
neck now with men in civic virtue and public service. Even more of them
are testing out these vices which formerly were supposed to be peculiar
to men. They are much more easily deceived by their own emotions and by
the flattery of politicians than the simplest maidens ever were by the
eloquence of false lovers. I suppose when they realize that they have
caught the bull by the horns they will retire from public life, go home
and pay more attention to their yearling sons and daughters. Right now
it seems to me that there are too many delinquent mothers broadcasting
noble thoughts as mere citizens.

I shrink like a criminal from a nearer approach to these women. I
have neither the rostrum mind nor the qualities of courage suitable
for bearing banners in a parade. I must vote because it is my duty
now to do so, but this is taxing to my moral nature on account of
the character of the candidates put up. When it comes to choosing
a politician for office I am a conscientious objector. I am an
impractical Democrat who would prefer to vote for a Republican if
he proved more nearly competent. I have barely sense enough not to
follow my conscience in this matter and must always keep out of the
way or stand among more valiant women a cubit short of the correct
political stature. This keeps me silent when I should like to write a
few pertinent political paragraphs for publication, especially before
elections.

Crime has become an intellectual pursuit and a profitable profession
these latter years. Formerly only rascals and defectives became
criminals; now learned men and youngsters choose criminal careers.
The youths are criminally insane because they have not received the
training and discipline necessary to insure moral sanity. The passing
of parents is a tragic circumstance. Formerly they exercised control
and commanded obedience of their children. Now they do not. I know
many families where the elder sons and daughters were brought up, you
may say, under the old dispensation of parental authority, while the
younger ones have grown up under the new order since the spirit of the
times has changed. They matriculate into the streets, then into an
adventurous school life, and finally into the universities, where they
are provided with funds and speed facilities that would turn the head
of a wise man, besides being made subjects for intellectual experiments
by professors who have theories to prove.

The contrast between the characters of the older and younger sons and
daughters in these families is frightfully significant. The first
are morally sane, the others are not. Even if they commit no crimes,
they practice a license in conduct and thinking which leads to the
disruption of society.

This is the reason why the defense of these young criminals depends
upon the testimony of alienists rather than upon the evidence of
witnesses to their crime. They have managed in this sentimental age to
struggle beyond the control of parents and beyond the reach of judges
and juries. They are voluntary moral idiots with intellectual leanings
toward every vice. My feeling is that we wait too long to send for the
alienist. One should be employed to visit these boys and girls like any
other health officer, so that we may be warned in time of sprouting
criminals.

Somewhere in this confusion men and women are passing out into the
light of great achievements. Maybe the time will come when the science
of medicine will have advanced so far inoculation will take the place
of morals in eradicating the physical effects of vice. But to what
end? Nature is a better economist. She condemns the depraved to death.
Disease is her quarantine method against every excess. Maybe in time
we shall have more and more machinery to do the work of the world.
Machines will not strike or join a labor union, but neither will they
work without a man’s brain and aid to guide them. In any case, what is
to become of the surplus man power?

This is not a happy moment in the world’s history. Never was there
such a smoke screen between us and the future. I have a great wish to
travel out there, at least to the edge of it, not as a tourist, but as
a tired pilgrim who has come a long way in bad weather lifts his eyes
and sees through the darkness a light shining, the open door of a house
warm with peace and kindness. I want again at the very last the faith
and hopes with which I started life. I remember that feeling, a sort of
winged lightness of the heart. But I may never find the way. Something
seems to be turning to ashes on my lips; not this valley or the scenes
I have laid in it for happiness, but it is because I have no power of
happiness now in me.




L

CAN WE BE HAPPY?


At the risk of offending many people, but with the hope of helping a
few who are making the same mistake, I am venturing at the very end
of the record to set down the only explanation that occurs to me: I
believe I have totally misunderstood the Scriptures by which I was
guided during the formative years of my life. I had in the beginning
a natural gift for the simplest, most innocent happiness. I needed no
more than a bright day and a long path winding across the hills and
through the fields. I had a mind which retained the lacy shadows leaves
made upon the ground. Now I seem to have lost the will to take these
little idle paths to peace and happiness. I could weep sometimes when
at this season of the year the wind blows a shower of yellow elm leaves
twinkling like gold high in the sunlight because I can only see them. I
do not feel the loveliness of the sight.

The reason is that I have spent my life and strength in service and
sacrifice according to the way the Scriptures have been heaped upon me
by preachers and my own dear saint who died a martyr’s death to such
teachings. If I had had the courage to interpret them according to my
own good senses, provided especially by the Lord for that purpose, I
should have known the doctrines precisely as He promises.

How many sermons I have heard from this text, ‘Bear ye one another’s
burdens,’ but not one preacher ever interpreted them to mean, ‘Do not
bear the other fellow’s burden unless he will bear one of yours.’
Therefore this bearing of other people’s burdens has contributed more
to damnable selfishness in this world than any other Christian virtue.
Here is another one, ‘Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be
opened unto you.’

I got the right cue on that one long ago. When Lundy was in mortal
need of some earthly blessing, I used to go out and seek it with
both hands and knock on every door until the right one opened to
him. But I lacked the time and sense to practice the same wisdom for
myself. I have earned more than I deserve, Heaven knows, but I have
not sought sensibly the little things I needed for happiness. I have
wasted too much of my time for others, without having the spiritual
gumption to ask them to pay it back. There is no telling how much
moral damage I have done in this world practicing the religion I have
been taught, which I now know was a puerile and spiritually illiterate
interpretation of the Scriptures. I have had my share of blame in
making whimpering parasites of honest people in the name of the Lord.
It was blasphemous, and my hope for forgiveness is repentance and a
determination to reform.

I shall never be able to face what remains of the future properly
without weaning myself of this inglorious and sentimentally spiritual
past. Therefore I must change my scenes, as a bad man sometimes goes
off to escape the temptation of evil companions. At the present
moment I am in bondage to all manner of charitable habits and false
obligations which would read like the calendar of a saint’s deeds if
I should set them down here, but they are really the tax I pay upon a
wrong interpretation of the Christian life.

This is what I have discovered--that there is no way to satisfy a
sentimental conscience. It is the thief in your breast. The more you
give, the more will it urge you to give; the more you sacrifice, the
greater sacrifices will it demand of you. I am determined to stop
gratifying my conscience. I am far more honorable and sensible than it
is. I shall be guided by my sense. And that points directly to casting
off every weight that besets me and looking about for the fair weather
of happier days.

My idea is to prove the Scriptures by seeking and finding happiness.
I am late starting off on this adventure, and I have no very definite
idea about the direction in which happiness lies, but that very
uncertainty has a sort of sparkle in it. My feeling now is that I
shall need only to get away from my dreadful past to find it changing
me to some easier goodness of mind, a place where I can sit down and
not be responsible for anything or anybody, where I shall feel light
on my feet and ready to travel a long way in bright silence to another
country. Sometimes it seems to me that I may be thinking of the kingdom
of Heaven.

We do grow up at last somewhere, but not in this present world. We
invariably pass out of it trying to add another cubit to our stature,
topping it off with a poor little deed of no importance to any one but
ourselves. I doubt if any man or woman, however old, is really ready
to give up his ghost. There is something he had not time to say or to
finish before this chill came on and this shortening of the breath.
Maybe it is a blessed illusion with which we instinctively finance our
feeling of worth and importance when we are no longer of any worth or
importance, but I do not think so. My idea is that it may be a sort
of a dull intimation of immortality, a feeling of incompleteness, as
if there must be much more life in which to finish up things; not the
things we started here, but other cubits to be added later. I have
always thought of saints as being exceedingly tall spirits, probably a
trifle top-heavy as to their countenances.

As I have grown older I am more and more convinced that I have not
grown up, that my powers have not come to me, not my real wisdom to do
and achieve the right thoughts. I lack some dear grace. I cannot seem
to steady down and get the single eye. There is a curriculum in living
which I have not studied. This may be happiness. I want to know it; I
should feel better prepared for immortality. I do not wish to arrive
fagged at last and a bit slipshod in the spirit, as if I had a hard
time all my mortal life. It is not complimentary to God. I wish to come
up before His face in a high mood as if I had tasted all His benefits.
I wish to be clothed in the bright garments of my human happiness, more
colorful than the glistening white robes of the merely redeemed.

I have an intimate feeling of God that this is a bright idea, and that
at least it is permitted one may seek happiness even if at last he must
sink into the defeat of mere peace.


THE END




Transcriber’s Notes


Italics have been represented by _underlines_. Small caps have been
represented by CAPITALS.

A few inconsistencies in hyphenation have been reconciled, and minor
printing errors in punctuation have been silently corrected.






*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AS A WOMAN THINKS ***


    

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.


START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg
electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg License when
you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
    other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
    whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
    of the Project Gutenberg™ License included with this eBook or online
    at www.gutenberg.org. If you
    are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
    of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
  
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works
provided that:

    • You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
        the use of Project Gutenberg works calculated using the method
        you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
        to the owner of the Project Gutenberg trademark, but he has
        agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
        within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
        legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
        payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
        Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
        Literary Archive Foundation.”
    
    • You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
        you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
        does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
        License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
        copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
        all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
        works.
    
    • You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
        any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
        electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
        receipt of the work.
    
    • You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
        distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
    

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 41 Watchung Plaza #516,
Montclair NJ 07042, USA, +1 (862) 621-9288. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.