That Dunlevy spent much of his time in idleness and apparent emptiness of mind can not be denied. He was indolent. He tells us so. He was born under the Southern sun at a period when indolence had recently been aristocratic and at a premium. This very inability to adapt himself to energetic work, constitutional though it was, seemed to haunt him with the idea that he was indeed a useless being. To call his little volume of scattered sheets literally the memoirs of a failure was no misnomer. And he knew it.
To be born indolent and to have also a delicate conscience is an unhappy birth even for normally healthy mortals who have a cheery home. But in addition to his physical inertia, to be at the mercy of an irritable temperament, and to be a wandering recluse, was enough to make Dunlevy go under. And I fear that he did so.
I imagine that Dunlevy kept going from one disappointment to another, trying to repair past errors by some new effort. He must often have asked: How is it that with intelligence and so much remorse, you are still so little master of yourself? “The sore of his whole life is there—unbelief and desire.”
After sending me his box, he disappeared from America and apparently went into hiding. Stripped of the sparse details which I have been able to gather about him, Dunlevy’s life is lacking in outward incident; for the most part, it is a complete blank. We wonder how it is that we know so little about a Rabelais or a Shakespeare. What do we know of our nearest neighbor? In the present case but one thing seems certain: tragedy seemed to follow tragedy in the life of William Wirt Dunlevy. He lost his mother when he was a little child; he lost his father when he was not more than a grown boy; he lost his young betrothed on the very verge of approaching marriage; he lost his faith; he lost his health; and he lost his ambition—all before the age when most men have not felt even one of these sorrows.
There remain, and always will remain, many dark places in his experience. And it has seemed to me that it would be a breach of friendship for me to attempt to throw light upon either his family history or his private life, aside from what he gives in his own papers. It would savor too much of professional biography. I do not know the man’s age. I have never sought out even the full name of his father, nor his mother’s maiden name. It was sufficient for him to tell me in his own letter that he had neither kith nor kin. That closed further inquiry.
Perhaps it will not do for me to go no deeper into the meaning of Dunlevy’s documents, if I propose to offer them for public scrutiny, even though I personally feel that the moment one begins to analyze their meaning, the meaning disappears. So it is with pleasure. The moment you become conscious of pleasure and try to handle it and to label it, the pleasure vanishes, and you pursue a flying goal. Spontaneous happiness is never conscious. And the meaning of personal, spontaneous writing may be felt, but not epitomized.
What, then, does Dunlevy mean?
I repeat that I am unable to state his meaning, though I believe that the man had something to say. Perhaps if I should force myself to phrase a hypothetical meaning, I might say that the difference between happiness and unhappiness is the difference between positive and negative thoughts. Positive thoughts are constructive. And Dunlevy unconsciously illustrates by means of his own personality that he cherished negative thoughts, and was therefore a negative man. But Dunlevy does not allow us to dismiss him with the trite conclusion that because sentiments are personal, they are necessarily autobiographical. He makes us go further, and asks: “Why should I have been a failure? I admit that it was because I had a weak will. But how did it happen that my will was weak? Does the onus of the blame fall upon my ancestors and myself or upon civilization?” He makes both share the responsibility, but he brings his stronger indictment against our civilization; because he proves that he started out with clean instincts and a desire to do good. This is the only way that I can account for his writing two such papers as the one in which he introduces the Strange Professor, and the other in which he writes as a little child, side by side. In the former, he shows himself on the very verge of acute insanity, fighting to save the control of his reason; and in the latter, he shows that he had it also in him to lie awake in the dark and ponder that once he was not so, that once he was “a little brown-headed boy, unfettered with the knowledge of evil,” and with the potentialities of goodness and deep affection in him, and of a decent ambition to amount to some one. Two such papers as these were actually found by me written side by side in his manuscript book; and I noted that the calm, saner one was written after the other.
No, no, it will not do to dismiss Dunlevy as a bitter, bad-minded egoist. No, no, that will not do. The man was utterly dissatisfied with the outcome of his life. You can be no more disgusted with him than he is disgusted with himself. And if there be truth in the main drift of his contention, what boots it whether he was sane or insane? He believed in the Omnipotence of Truth, no matter how much we, transitory atoms, try to cloud Truth by befogging each other and hoodwinking ourselves.
