The Emblems of Fidelity: A Comedy in Letters

by James Lane Allen

You cannot for a moment imagine—however, you despise imagination and I withdraw the offensive word—you cannot for a moment suppose that I can have any motive in being discourteous, and I shall, therefore, go on to say, but only with your permission, that the first time I attempted to sketch you, was in a very early piece of work; I was a youthful novelist, at the outset of my career. I projected a story entitled: "The Married Cross-Purposes of Ned and Sal Blivvens." I feel bound to say that you in your letter pleasantly remind me of the Sal Blivvens of my story. In Sal's eyes poor Ned's failing was this: as twenty-one human shillings he never made an exact human guinea—his shillings ran a few pence over, or they fell a few pence short. That is, Ned never did just enough of anything, or said just enough, but either too much or too little to suit Sal. He never had just one idea about any one thing, but two or three ideas; he never felt in just one way about any one thing, but had mixed feelings, a variety of feelings. He was not a yard measure or a pint measure or a pound measure; he overflowed or he didn't fill, and any one thing in him always ran into other things in him.

Being a young novelist I was not satisfied to offer Sal to the world on her own account, but I must try to make her more credible and formidable by following her into the next generation, and giving her a son who inherited her traits. Thus I had Tommy Blivvens. When Tommy was old enough to receive his first allowance of Christmas pudding, he proceeded to take the pudding to pieces. He picked out all the raisins and made a little pile of them. And made a little separate pile of the currants, and another pile of the almonds, and another of the citron, or of whatever else there was to separate. Then in profound satisfaction he ate them, pile by pile, as a philosopher of the sure.

Thus—and I insist I mean no disrespect—your letter does revive for me a little innocent laughter at my early literary vision of a human baggage—friend of my youthful days and artistic enthusiasm—Sal Blivvens. I arranged that when Ned died, his neighbours all felt sorry and wished him a green turf for his grave. Sal, I felt sure, survived him as one who all her life walks past every human heart and enters none—being always dead-sure, always dead-right; for the human heart rejects perfection in any human being.

I recognise you as belonging to the large tough family of the human cocksures. Sal Blivvens belonged to it—dead-sure, dead-right, every time. We have many of the cocksures in England, you must have many of them in the United States. The cocksures are people who have no dim borderland around their minds, no twilight between day and darkness. They see everything as they see a highly coloured rug on a well-lighted floor. There is either rug or no rug, either floor or no floor. No part of the floor could possibly be rug and no part of the rug could possibly be floor. A cocksure, as a lawyer, is the natural prosecuting attorney of human nature's natural misgivings and wiser doubts and nobler errors. How the American cocksures of their day despised the man Washington, who often prayed for guidance; with what contempt they blasted the character of your Abraham Lincoln, whose patient soul inhabited the border of a divine disquietude and whose public life was the patient study of hesitation.

I have taken notice of the peculiarly American character of your cocksureness: it magnifies and qualifies a man to step by the mile, to sit down by the acre, to utter things by the ton. Do you happen to know Michael Angelo's Moses? I always think of an American cocksure as looking like Michael Angelo's Moses—colossal law-giver, a hyper-stupendous fellow. And I have often thought that a regiment of American cocksures would be the most terrific spectacle on a battlefield that the rest of the human race could ever face. Just now it has occurred to me that it was your great Emerson who spoke best on the weakness of the superlative—the cocksure is the human superlative.

As to your letter: You declare you know nothing about novels, but your arraignment of the novelist is exact. You are dead-sure that you are perfectly right about me. Your arraignment of me is exact. You are conscious of no more moral perturbation as to justice than exists in a monkey wrench. But that is the nature of the cocksure—his conclusions have to him the validity of a hardware store.

This, however, is nothing. I clear it away in order to tell you that I am filled with admiration of your loyalty to your friend, and of the savage ferocity with which you attack me as his enemy. That makes you a friend worth having, and I wish you were to be numbered among mine; there are none too many such in this world. Next, I wish to assure you that I have studied your brief against me and confess that you have made out the case. I fell into a grave mistake, I wronged your friend deeply, I hope not irreparably, and it was a poor, sorry, shabby business. I am about to write to Mr. Sands. If he is what you say he is, then in an instant he will forgive me—though you never may. I shall ask him, as I could not have asked him before, whether he will not come to visit me. My house, my hospitality, all that I have and all that I am, shall be his. I shall take every step possible to undo what I thoughtlessly, impulsively did. I shall write to the President of his Club.

One exception is filed to a specification in your brief: no such things took place in my garden upon the visit of the American tourists, as you declare. I did not promulgate any mysterious hostility to Mr. Sands. You tell me that among those tourists were persons hostile to Mr. Sands. It was these hostile persons who misinterpreted and exaggerated whatever took place. You knew these persons to be enemies of Mr. Sands's and then you accepted their testimony as true—being a cocksure.

A final word to you. Your whole character and happiness rests upon the belief that you see life clearly and judge rightly the fellow-beings whom you know. Those you doubt ought to be doubted and those you trust ought to be trusted! Now I have travelled far enough on life's road to have passed its many human figures—perhaps all the human types that straggle along it in their many ways. No figures on that road have been more noticeable to me than here and there a man in whom I have discerned a broken cocksure.

You say you like biography: do you like to read the Life of Robert Burns? And I wonder whether these words of his have ever guided you in your outlook upon life: