Yet again do we enter the troubled circles of the higher conscience. Ah! how true it is that, here, too, ‘the so-called psychology is a hobgoblin that has usurped, in the sanctuary itself, the place reserved for the veritable images of the gods.’ For it is not the surface that always concerns us—nay, nor is it even the deepest of hidden thoughts. Do you imagine that love knows only of thoughts, and acts, and words, and that the soul never emerges from its dungeon? Do I need to be told whether she whom I take in my arms to-day is jealous or faithful, gay or sad, sincere or treacherous? Do you think that these wretched words can attain the heights whereon our souls repose and where our destiny fulfils itself in silence? What care I whether she speak of rain or jewels, of pins or feathers; what care I though she appear not to understand? Do you think that it is for a sublime word I thirst when I feel that a soul is gazing into my soul? Do I not know that the most beautiful of thoughts dare not raise their heads when the mysteries confront them? I am ever standing at the sea-shore; and, were I Plato, Pascal, or Michael Angelo, and the woman I loved merely telling me of her earrings, the words I would say and the words she would say would appear but the same as they floated on the waves of the fathomless inner sea, that each of us would be contemplating in the other. Let but my very loftiest thought be weighed in the scale of life or love, it will not turn the balance against the three little words that the maid who loves me shall have whispered of her silver bangles, her pearl necklace, or her trinkets of glass....
It is we who do not understand, for that we never rise above the earth-level of our intellect. Let us but ascend to the first snows of the mountain, and all inequalities are levelled by the purifying hand of the horizon that opens before us. What difference then between a pronouncement of Marcus Aurelius and the words of the child complaining of the cold? Let us be humble, and learn to distinguish between accident and essence. Let not ‘sticks that float’ cause us to forget the prodigies of the gulf. The most glorious thoughts and the most degraded ideas can no more ruffle the eternal surface of our soul than, amidst the stars of Heaven, Himalaya or precipice can alter the surface of the earth. A look, a kiss, and the certainty of a great invisible presence: all is said; and I know that she who is by my side is my equal....
But truly this equal is admirable, and strange; and, when love comes to her, even the lowest of wantons possesses that which we never have, inasmuch as, in her thoughts, love is always eternal. Therefore it is, perhaps, that, besides their primitive instincts, all women have communications with the unknown that are denied to us. Great is the distance that separates the best of men from the treasures of the second boundary; and, when a solemn moment of life demands a jewel from this treasure, they no longer remember the paths that thither lead, and vainly offer to the imperious, undeceivable circumstance the false trinkets that their intellect has fashioned. But the woman never forgets the path that leads to the centre of her being; and no matter whether I find her in opulence or in poverty, in ignorance or in fulness of knowledge, in shame or in glory, do I but whisper one word that has truly come forth from the virgin depths of my soul, she will retrace her footsteps along the mysterious paths that she has never forgotten, and without a moment’s hesitation will she bring back to me, from out her inexhaustible stores of love, a word, a look, or a gesture that shall be no less pure than my own. It is as though her soul were ever within call; for by day and night is she prepared to give answer to the loftiest appeals from another soul; and the ransom of the poorest is undistinguishable from the ransom of a queen....
With reverence must we draw near to them, be they lowly or arrogant, inattentive or lost in dreams, be they smiling still or plunged in tears; for they know the things that we do not know, and have a lamp that we have lost. Their abiding-place is at the foot itself of the Inevitable, whose well-worn paths are visible to them more clearly than to us. And thence it is that their strange intuitions have come to them, their gravity at which we wonder; and we feel that, even in their most trifling actions, they are conscious of being upheld by the strong, unerring hands of the gods. I said before that they drew us nearer to the gates of our being: verily might we believe, when we are with them, that that primeval gate is opening, amidst the bewildering whisper that doubtless waited on the birth of things, then when speech was yet hushed, for fear lest command or forbidding should issue forth, unheard....
She will never cross the threshold of that gate; and she awaits us within, where are the fountain-heads. And when we come and knock from without, and she opens to our bidding, her hand will still keep hold of latch and key. She will look, for one instant, at the man who has been sent to her, and in that brief moment she has learned all that had to be learned, and the years to come have trembled to the end of time.... Who shall tell us of what consists the first look of love, ‘that magic wand made of a ray of broken light,’ the ray that has issued forth from the eternal home of our being, that has transformed two souls, and given them twenty centuries of youth? The door may open again, or close; pay no heed, nor make further effort, for all is decided. She knows. She will no longer concern herself with the things you do, or say, or even think; and if she notice them, it will be but with a smile, and unconsciously will she fling from her all that does not help to confirm the certitudes of that first glance. And if you think you have deceived her, and that her impression is wrong, be sure that it is she who is right, and you yourself who are mistaken; for you are more truly that which you are in her eyes than that which in your soul you believe yourself to be, and this even though she may forever misinterpret the meaning of a gesture, a smile or a tear....
Hidden treasures that have not even a name!... I would that all those who have suffered at women’s hands, and found them evil, would loudly proclaim it, and give us their reasons; and if those reasons be well founded we shall be indeed surprised, and shall have advanced far forward in the mystery. For women are indeed the veiled sisters of all the great things we do not see. They are indeed nearest of kin to the infinite that is about us, and they alone can still smile at it with the intimate grace of the child, to whom its father inspires no fear. It is they who preserve here below the pure fragrance of our soul, like some jewel from Heaven, which none know how to use; and were they to depart, the spirit would reign in solitude in a desert. Theirs are still the divine emotions of the first days; and the sources of their being lie, deeper far than ours, in all that was illimitable. Those who complain of them know not the heights whereon the true kisses are to be found, and verily do I pity them. And yet, how insignificant do women seem when we look at them as we pass by! We see them moving about in their little homes; this one is bending forward, down there another is sobbing, a third sings and the last sews; and there is not one of us who understands.... We visit them, as one visits pleasant things; we approach them with caution and suspicion, and it is scarcely possible for the soul to enter. We question them, mistrustfully—they, who know already, answer naught, and we go away, shrugging our shoulders, convinced that they do not understand.... ‘But what need for them to understand,’ answers the poet, who is always right, ‘what need for them to understand, those thrice happy ones who have chosen the better part, and who, even as a pure flame of love in this earth of ours, token of the celestial fire that irradiates all things, shine forth only from the pinnacles of temples and the mastheads of ships that wander? Some of Nature’s strangest secrets are often revealed, at sacred moments, to these maidens who love, and ingenuously and unconsciously will they declare them. The sage follows in their footsteps to gather up the jewels, that in their innocence and joy they scatter along the path. The poet, who feels what they feel, offers homage to their love, and tries, in his songs, to transplant that love, that is the germ of the age of gold, to other times and other countries.’ For what has been said of the mystics applies above all to women, since it is they who have preserved the sense of the mystic in our earth to this day....
THE TRAGICAL IN
DAILY LIFE