What hocus-pocus I must seem to be talking, as if there were some cheap tragedy in my life. Indeed there is nothing of the sort. I have lived as tamely as a house-cat, my only escapade having been an innocent attempt at playing Timon for a couple of years. The drama of my life has been a mere battling with shadows. Your relation of the effect produced in your home by Dr. Minot’s heresies carries me back to the first act in that shadow fight, for I too was brought up by the strictest of parents, and, indeed, was myself, as a boy, a veritable prodigy of piety. What would you think of me as a preacher expounding the gospel over a piano-stool for pulpit to a rapt congregation of three? I could show you a sermon of that precocious Mr. Pound-text printed in the New York Observer when he was as much as nine years old—and the sermon might be worse.

I can recall these facts readily enough; but the battle of doubt and faith that I passed through a few years later I can no more realise than I can now realise your father’s blessed assurance of heaven. I know vaguely that it was a time of unspeakable agony for me, a rending asunder, as it were, of soul and body. The doctrine was bred into my bones; I saw the folly of it intellectually, but the emotional comfort of it was the very quintessence of my life. The struggle came upon me alone and I was without help or guidance. Into those few years of boyish vacillation, I see now that the whole tragedy of more than a century of human experience was thrust. One day I sat in church listening to a sermon of appealing eloquence: “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” Was I too deliberately turning my back on the light? I hid my face and cried. That was the end. I came out of the church free, but I had suffered too much. Something passed from my life that day which nothing can replace; for perfect faith, like love, comes to a man but once.

1 was empty of comfort and without resting-place for my spirit. Then said I: Look you, belief in this religion as dogma is gone; why not hold fast to its imaginative beauty! If revelation is a fraud, at least the intricacies of this catholic faith have grown up from the long yearning of the human heart, and possess this inner reality of corresponding with our spiritual needs. And for several years I wrought at Christian symbolism, trying to build up for my soul a home of poetical faith so to speak. But in the end this could not satisfy me; I knew that I was cherishing a sham, a pretty make-believe after the manner of children. Better the blindness of true religion than this illusion of the imagination. And I was now a grown man.

Then by some inner guidance I turned to India. How shall I tell you what I found in the philosophies of that land! One thing will surprise you. Instead of pessimism I found in India during a certain period of time a happiness, an exultation of happiness, such as the world to-day cannot even imagine. And I found that this happiness sprang from no pretended revelation but from a profound understanding of the heart. Do this, said the books, and you will feel thus, and so step by step to the consummation of ecstasy. I read and was amazed; I understood and knew that I too, if my will were strong, might slip from bondage and be blessed. But I saw further that the path lay away from this world, that I must renounce every desire which I had learned to call good, that I must strip my soul naked of all this civilisation which we have woven in a loom of three thousand years. The dying command of Buddha terrified me: “All things pass away; work out your own salvation diligently!” The words were spoken to comfort and strengthen the bereaved disciples, but to me they sounded as an imprecation, so different is the training of our society from theirs. The loneliness and austerity of the command appalled me; I would not take the first step, and turned back to seek the beautiful things of the eye.

And now at last I am caught up in the illusion of a new Western ideal—not Christianity, for that has passed away, strange as such a statement may sound to you in your orthodox home, but yet a legacy of Christ. Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself, was the law of Christianity. We have forgotten God and the responsibility of the individual soul to its own divinity; we have made a fetish of our neighbour’s earthly welfare. We are not Christians but humanitarians, followers of a maimed and materialistic faith. This is the ideal of the world to-day, and from it I see but one door of escape—and none but a strong man shall open that door.

So I look at the world and life, but, even as I write, something like a foreboding shudder comes over me. I think of your home and your father and the straitness of the law under which you live, and I wonder whether after all the ghost of that fierce theology is yet laid. Can it be that this law which darkened my boyhood shall arise again and claim the joy of my maturer years?

Alas, you who venture to trip so gayly about the rim of my shadow-land with your brave incantations, behold what spirit of gloom and malignant mutterings you have evoked from the night. I have written more than I meant—too much, I fear.

XII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

My dear Mr. Towers: