I reached the Inlet via the Boardwalk, making record time, and drew the first happy sigh in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if I had enjoyed a new pleasure I didn't propose to give up the old ones. Then my nerves! And when I meet Gabriele d'Annunzio I can look him in the eye. He flew over Trieste, but I flew over my fears—a moral as well as a physical victory for a timid conservative.
CHAPTER XXX
PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING
(From the editorial page of the New York Sun, December 31, 1916)
It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs from the god of chance his pity for the living. Aye! it is those who are about to live, not to die, that we should salute. Life is the eternal slayer; death is but the final punctuation of the vital paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical conspiracy of deception encircles us. We call it Maya, and flatter our finite sense of humour that we are no longer entrapped by the shining appearance of things when we say aloud: Stay, thou art so subtle that we know you for what you are—the profoundest instinct of life: its cruel delight in pretending to be what it is not. We are now, all of us who think that we think, newly born Fausts with eyes unbandaged of the supreme blinders, Time and Space. Nature clothes the skeleton in a motley suit of flesh, but our supersharpened ears overhear the rattling of the bones. We are become so wise that love itself is no longer a sentiment, only a sensation; religion is first cousin to voluptuousness; and if we are so minded we may jig to the tune of the stars up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at the cloud-gates of the infinite inane. Naught succeeds like negation, and we swear that in the house of the undertaker it is impolite to speak of shrouds. We are nothing if not determinists. And we believe that the devil deserves the hindmost.
We live in order to forget life. For our delicate machinery of apperception there is no longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are the acid and alkali of existence. And as too much acid deranges the stomach, so vice corrodes the soul, and thus we are virtuous by compulsion. Yet we know that evil serves its purpose in the vast chemistry of being, and if banished the consequences might not be for universal good; other evils would follow in the train of a too comprehensive mitigation, and our end a stale swamp of vain virtues. Resist not evil! Which may mean the reverse of what it seems to preach. The master modern immoralist has said: Embrace evil! that we may be over and done with it. Toys are our ideals; glory, goodness, wealth, health, happiness; all toys except health; health of the body, of the soul. And the first shall be last.
The human soul in health? But there is no spiritual health. The mystic, Doctor Tauler, has said: "God does not reside in a vigorous body"; sinister; nevertheless, equitable. The dolorous certitude that the most radiant of existences ends in the defeat of disease and death; that happiness is relative, a word empty of meaning in the light of experience, and non-existent as an absolute; that the only divine oasis in our feverish activities is sleep; sleep the prelude to the profound and eternal silence—why then this gabble about soul-states and the peace that passeth all understanding? Simply because the red corpuscles that rule our destinies are, when dynamic, mighty breeders of hope; if the powers and principalities of darkness prevail, our guardian angels, the phagocytes, are dominated by the leucocytes. Gods and devils, Ormuzd and Ahriman, and other phantasms of the sky, may all be put on a microscopic slide and their struggles noted. And the evil ones are ever victors in the diabolical game. No need to insist on it. In the heart of mankind there is a tiny shrine with its burning taper; the idol is Self; the propitiatory light is for subliminal foes. Alas! in vain. We succumb, and in our weakness we sink into the grave. If only we were sure of the River Styx afterward we should pay the ferry-tax with joy. Better Hades than the poppy of oblivion. "Ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever," as Sir Thomas Browne sagely remarks.
The pious and worthy Doctor Jeremy Taylor, who built cathedral-like structures of English prose to the greater glory of God and for the edification of ambitious rhetoricians, has dwelt upon the efficacy of prayer in a singularly luminous passage: "Holy prayer procures the ministry and services of angels. It rescinds the decrees of God. It cures sickness and obtains pardon. It arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon. It rules over all God's creatures and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain. It unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence of fire. It stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our sufferance and weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of persecution. It pleases God and supplies all our needs. But prayer that can do this much for us can do nothing at all without holiness, for God heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of God and doth His will, him He heareth."