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Yet, I have no doubt now of America’s answer when the call is clear: only we will respond from different motives. If the sense of duty is not developed here by old traditions, there is a man’s pride in doing what free men should do. It will be a great voluntary impulse, something that has come down to us from our strong, free, battling ancestors of Jutland, of those who sang of heroic deaths and defied the tempest and the perils of the forest, who never bowed to king or conqueror,—the fierce dissenting strain of Saxon manhood. I am not afraid of this heritage when stirred by the test of war;—but in peace?
What is the basic impulse, then, that moves through our Anglo-Saxon civilization? It is the relation between man and woman, and this conception of love as heroic is of the origins of our race. Christianity did not exalt women with us. In the days of the Berserkers and the sea-rovers, man and woman clove together in single partnership and kept their faith. So, to-day, the children in the house are but waiting the touch of destiny, free agents, held by no family tradition, impatient for life to open to them. Under all the sentimentalism of our literature and art there is this abiding instinct, the need of love that shall come as a directing purpose. Each child, in the imagination of boy or girl, holds it as his right to give his heart where it pleases him, no matter what the wrench or what the sacrifice, as the beginning and the meaning of life. In this instinct to determine our own existence as children in our father’s house, we remain fierce and rebellious, as our Saxon heroes who served, but feared neither their gods nor their masters. We do not inherit our homes: we create them.
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My little sister, who hangs on my arm and comes to me with her confidences, knows deep in her heart that this is not her home. To-morrow she will look in the eyes of some stranger and, despite all our entreaties, pleadings, warnings, put her hand in his and follow him into the outer world. No wonder that we have colonized the earth, when each of us has in him the soul of the pioneer! And now that I have written this, I think I understand why I cannot do what would be so easy for a Latin to do. Marriage to us is not a formula, but a need of our hidden spiritual self, the meaning of our existence. No, I can never turn to Anne with a divided memory, not even in the instinct of self-preservation!
Everything separates me from Bernoline. In our basic conceptions of life, she in her clear outlook of faith, and I in my driven questionings; she in her unquestioned acceptance of duty; I in my rebellion against aught which means the immolation of self on the altar of convention. We are as distant as though she stood at the threshold of a hundred years and I at the close. A civilization and an age intervene between us. Yet why, knowing this, despite instinct and will, have we been powerless to turn away? Is it, I wonder, because the thing is so utterly hopeless, forbidden, destructive, that the instinct of Eden draws us irresistibly to our destiny?
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Yesterday I read in Maeterlinck’s “Life of The Bee” that strange and terrible chapter of the Nuptial Flight, which in its fearful mystery of love and death reveals to us the mysterious origin in nature’s purpose of our human seeking. How little we foresee in the first quickening ecstasy of our beings the destiny of tragedy towards which we move! How little, in that one clear, untroubled afternoon, when all the beating frenzy in me grew still and peaceful with the knowledge that I was loved, did I divine that the rapture which held me was but the prelude to life denied and the ache of happiness remembered. Mystery of good and evil! How often this thought returns across the vista of my life!