Heart of Man

by George Edward Woodberry

So I spoke, as the words came to me, while we were still driving down the dark valley, in deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking out on a levelled world westward, stretching off with low, white, wreathing mists and moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bunk. We turned a great shoulder of the hills, and the moon shone out bright and clear, riding in heaven; and the southward reach unlocked, and gave itself for miles to our eyes. At the instant, while the ponies came back upon their haunches at the drop of the long descent ahead, we both cried out, "the Looking-glass!" There it was, about a mile away before and below us, as plain as a pikestaff,—a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth as the floor of cloud seen from above among mountains, silent, motionless,—for all the world like an immense, spectral looking-glass, set there in the half-darkened waste. It was evidently what gave the name to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name elsewhere in the Western country, and I suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon. For an hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was an eerie thing—the earth-light of the moon on that side,—I saw it all the time.

"The difference you spoke of," I began, with my eyes upon that spectral pool, "is only that change which belongs to life, dissolving like illusion, but not itself illusion. I am not aware of any break; it is the old life in a higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in the soul especially, seems less a state of being than a thing of transformation, whose successive shapes we wear; and so far as that change is self-determined," I continued, making almost an effort to think, so weird was that scene before us, "the soul proceeds by foreknowledge of itself in the ideal, and wills the change by ideal living, which is not a conflict with the actual but a process out of it, conditioned in almost a Darwinian way on that brain-futuring which entered into the struggle for animal existence even with such enormous modifying power. In our old days, under the sway of new scientific knowledge, we instinctively saw man in the perspective of nature, and then man seemed almost an after-thought of nature; but having been produced, late in her material history, and gifted with foresight that distinguished him from all else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby that speed which is so perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slowness of the orbing of stars and the building of continents. He has used his powers of prescience for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, might it happen that through his control of elemental forces and his acquaintance with infinite space, he should reach the point of applying prescience in nature's own material frame, and wield the world for the better accomplishment of her apparent ends,—that, though unimaginable now, would constitute the true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic motions,—chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to the moral reason. Unreal as such a thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling toward nature is discernible in the work of some impressionist landscape painters, who present colour and atmosphere and space without human intention, as a kind of artistry of science, having the same sort of elemental substance and interest that scientific truth has as an object of knowledge,—a curious form of the beauty of truth."

We spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before us lending atmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature's comment. "But," I continued, "what I had in mind to say was concerning our dead selves. The old phrase, life is a continual dying, is true, and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has been gathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, that we can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the dead selves which once we were." Instinctively we looked on the mystic glamour in the low valley, as on that Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of. I went on after the natural pause,—I could not help it,—"'I was a different man, then,' we say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but often with better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery. How old is the youth before he is aware of the fading away of vitality out of early beliefs? and then he feels the quick passing of the enthusiasms of opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet, disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. As time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective, one thing with another, and he discovers the incompleteness of single elements of ardour in the whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, art, and action in those books and men that had won his full confidence and what he called perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment of pause, as if this growth had in it some thing irrational and derogatory. The thinkers whose words of light and leading were the precious truth itself, the poets he idolized, the elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand in their places, who better appeal to his older mind, his finer impulses, his sounder judgment; and what true validity can these last have in the end? After a decade he can almost see his youth as something dead, his early manhood as something that will die. The poet, especially, who gives expression to himself, and puts his life at its period into a book, feels, as each work drops from his hand, that it is a portion of a self that is dead, though it was life in the making; and so with the embodiments of life in action, the man looks back on past greatness, past romance; for all life, working itself out—desire into achievement—dies to the man. Vital life lies always before. It is a strange thought that only by the death of what we now are, can we enter into our own hopes and victories; that it is by the slaying of the self which now is that the higher self takes life; that it is through such self-destruction that we live. The intermediate state seems a waste, and the knowledge that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; but this is the way ordained by which we must live, and such is life's magic that in each stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with trustfulness in itself. It is needful only, however much we outlive, to live more and better, and through all to remain true to the high causes, the faithful loves, the sacred impulses, that have given our imperfect life of the past whatever of nobility it may have; so shall death forever open into life. But," I ended, lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the dark slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the mystic to inquire whence and whither, the wild shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled to excuse its beauty, and happy is he who can live without too much thought of life."

The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a common stream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with the low indistinguishable country. We drove in silence down the valley along that shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs on the left rose into immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the night atmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood massive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on me and grew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded power of the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element of slower and more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and lift, almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl of the planet through space. Deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoing tread of the hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence was about us,—unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before the time of temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. If I stretched out my hand I should touch it like the ground. It came out from all the black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled the chill air,—it was an envelopment—it would be an engulfment—horse and man we were sinking in it. Then it was—most in all my days—that I felt dense mystery overwhelming me. "O infinite earth," I thought, "our unknowing mother, our unknowing grave!"—"What is it?" he said, feeling my wrist straighten where it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor and the hand seeking him. Was it a premonition? "Nothing," I answered, and did not tell him; but he began to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me back to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, the excitement of the ride died out, and an hour later, after midnight, we drove into the silent town. We put the ponies up, praising them with hand and voice; and then he took both my hands in his and said, "The truest thing you ever said was what you wrote me, 'We live each others' lives.'" That was his thanks.

O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of that far prairie in his niche of earth! How often I see him as in our first days,—the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his Thackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour after hour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortunate moments come back, with the strength and bloom of youth, as I recall the manly figure, the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways. Who of us knows what he is to another? He could not know how much his life entered into mine, and still enters. But he is dead; and I have set down these weak and stammering words of the life we began together, not for the strong and sure, but for those who, though true hearts, find it hard to lay hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the hope that some younger comrade of life, though unknown, may make them of avail and find in them the dark leading of a hand.