By our remembrances of days foregone,
Such were our faults—or then we thought them none.’”
DUNLEVY ABROAD?
It would do no good to give more extracts from Dunlevy’s manuscript, for my object is not to lay bare his entire work. If these fragments have afforded some insight into the character and opinions of this otherwise unknown man, then my purpose has been fulfilled.
Here would be the place, were I equal to it, to speak of him as a man and as a writer. After the manner of some biographers, perhaps I ought to see him standing alone, in lofty transports of thought and inspiring actions. On the contrary, I should much prefer to see him doing ordinary things. I would like to bring him near to us. I would like to make him more than a mysterious person. But both of these views are denied us. It is not as though Dunlevy were a statue which could be observed from any angle. I have had to take him as I found him.
In his life that has left behind it so few traces, I am at a loss for facts upon which to base any judgment. If I may speak for myself, I own that I have little intellectual sympathy with him in any way. I find nothing hopeful or inspiring in his writings. Somehow, he was always striving, and always failing, to go to the bottom of everything. He wished to give proof of more penetration and ethical intuition than he possessed. Are not his thoughts, after all, superficial? Does he get us anywhere? We, in this workaday age, must get somewhere. Sometimes I think that the chief reason why certain novels have plots is to get us to the end of the book, and that is somewhere.
“He teaches nothing, because he decides nothing; it is the very opposite of dogmatism. He is vain.—Hey! all men are, are they not? And those who seem modest, are not they doubly vain? The I and the me are on every line; but how should we ever have any knowledge except through the I and the me?” So wrote Madame DuDeffand once in a letter to Horace Walpole.
Yet I feel even in these few fragments of his the presence of an earnest and attaching sensibility. They show us Dunlevy struggling with a life-long secret, whose nature it is as difficult to read as its influence upon the whole trend of his temperament it is impossible to deny. Way back at the time when he wrote me his letter, in which he confessed a weakness for drink, one can see what a despairing glance he casts upon his life. Whatever this youthful secret was, we can only conjecture. He never tells us. He never so far forgot his private dignity and his instincts as a gentleman as to publish the reason why he did not marry. Here, the reader, if he has the desire, must go the rest of the way himself. I have referred to it now for the last time, because by so doing it becomes easier to speak of his manuscript. “The physiology and hygiene of a writer have become one of the indispensable chapters in any analysis that is made of his talent.” So says Sainte-Beuve. The result was that this effort to conceal his trouble and yet speak openly of himself gives all of his papers their personal note. That is why he has to walk on that delicate line between the real and the supernatural, maintaining his balance and always seeming to know where he is. That is why at times he sounds as though a Theosophist were talking to his Mahatma. Hence the styles, the moods, the visions, of this sane or insane man.