Sometimes at prayers
A vision seems to rise—
Borne on an air
Mayhap that blows from Hell.
And then I see the great Lord Jove
And all His mighty peers
Who ruled so many years
Above the ancient heavens,
Dwindle, and fade, and pass away,
And only Love remains—
I see the doctors of the ancient schools,
Great Egypt's sages, those who made the rules
Of wisdom in the Academe,
Fade also like a dream;
All their wise thoughts grow foolishness
And all their learning turns to dust,
And only Love remains
Forever young, forever wise and great,
And in the time to come
I see the same strong fate
Seize on our Mighty God
Who binds us in his chains,
And makes our love a sin
To drive our souls to Hell,
He too, with all his doctors
Fades—and only Love remains
Forever and forever. Fare you well.
November 30.
Yumei Mujitsu.
The Japanese possess a delightful word—Yumei Mujitsu—which signifies "Having-the-Name-but-not-the-Reality." They use it to express certain assumptions—such, for example, as the claim of the Mikado's descent from the Sun Goddess, which, like the formulæ of Algebra, achieve desired results though they recognize that in itself it has no existence. How valuable such a word would be to express the attitude of the Sentimentalist regarding a coloured man named Booker Washington, much discussed of late.
Now if there is one creature more than a saint whom I fear and distrust it is the Sentimentalist, whom Hawthorne pungently characterizes as "that steel machine of the Devil's own make." The ruthless heartlessness of the Sentimentalist would be unbelievable if one had not seen it with one's own eyes. Take, for example, the Abolitionists. To gratify their own emotions they caused the death of a million men, the infliction of wounds and pain that make the imagination shudder, and all that long succeeding anguish of a people—the grief, the poverty, humiliation, and despair that burned itself indelibly upon the hearts of those who shared it.
Stevenson—that misunderstood moralist now chiefly remembered as a story teller!—put his finger upon the enigma of the Sentimentalist's cruelty:
"Everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought or carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:—Ah, if I could show you these! if I could show you these men and women all the world over ... clinging in the brothel and on the scaffold to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!... They may seek to escape and yet they cannot ... they are condemned to some nobility, all their lives the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.... To touch the heart of his mystery we find in him the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God."
The Sentimentalist, along with all his kind, is hunted by that implacable need of virtue. To satisfy it he seizes upon the wrongs done by others, and in his hot denunciation of another's sin, in his clamour for its punishment, he experiences the warm ennobling glow of personal merit.
The pietist will meticulously perform rites and ceremonies in this same need to soothe the imperious call within him for some justification of his life. Having washed and bowed and recited, his sins of practice trouble him but little—those genuflections have made his balance good in the book of virtue. But the Sentimentalist cannot content himself with pale ceremonies. He is by instinct devouring and bloody, but his soul cringes before his inward monitor. By fierce denunciation of the sins he has no mind to he can soothe his desire to inflict pain in perfect content, upborne by a consciousness of his own righteousness. Torquemada was a type, John Brown of Ossawatamie another; both were criminal paranoics tortured by desire for blood and for self-justification. Real goodness does not stimulate the Sentimentalist's emotions—it gives no opportunity for the outcries that warm his heart with a consciousness of rectitude.