I have so many things to say to you. First of all, why do you blame me for my “foreknowledge”? You scold me for my hostility to the sentimentalism of the day, you scold me then for any act of common human sympathy, and now you take me to task because I foresee how you will address me in a letter. Dear me, what a horrid little scold it is! I wonder you didn’t quote The Raven,—
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!”
But really no great powers of prophecy were required. Have you forgotten that in the very letter before this one you called me “Dear Philip”? And wasn’t that a good index of your tempestuous, contradictory sweet self, that you should have begun your letter “My dear Mr. Philip Towers” and then thrown in your “Dear Philip” by the way, as if it would not be observed! Why, my naughty Jessica, when I came to that phrase, I just took my longest, biggest blue pencil and put a ring about it so that I might find it at a moment’s notice and feast my eyes a thousand thousand times on its sweet familiarity. Do not suppose that anything ever escapes me in your letters. I con every little lapse in your spelling until I know it by heart. And you do make so many slips, you know, in your reviews as well as in your letters! I never correct them,—that would be a desecration, I think,—but send up your copy just as it comes to me. Indeed, I find myself imitating unawares some of your most unaccountable originalities. Only the other day I was in the reading-room and our head proofreader, a sour, wizened old man, cried out to me: “I say, Mr. Towers, what is the matter with your spelling? You write propotion[2] for proportion and propersition for proposition, and get your r’s all mixed up generally!” There was a titter from all the girls in the room. Then said I: “Thou fool! knowest thou not that Jessica lives in the South, and treats her r’s with royal contempt as she was taught to treat the black man? And shall I not imitate her in this as in all her high-born originalities?” Of course I didn’t say that aloud, but just thought it to myself. And really I do wonder sometimes that your excellent father, when he taught you Latin, should have permitted you to take such liberties with our good mother tongue. But after all it is only another sign of your right Southern wilfulness. Do you not take even greater liberties with poor human souls?
And you make my prophetic powers a bulwark for your licentious rebellion and declare that you will always escape my bondage. Shall you, indeed? You once intimated that I wore ass’s ears. I begin to believe it. What a blind, solemn animal I was when I came to Morningtown to beg for your love! I was so afraid of you. And as we sat in the circle of your watching, motionless trees, something of their stiff ways entered into my heart. I told you of my love so solemnly, and you answered so solemnly. Fool! Fool! I should have spoken not a single word, but just taken you in my arms and kissed you once and twice. Don’t frown now, it is too late. There would have been one wild, tempestuous outbreak of indignation, and then my dryad maiden would have known my “foreknowledge” indeed. Is it too late to rehearse that curtain-raiser? Dear girl, I would be merry, but I am not so sure that all is well with my heart. I need you so much now, for I have entered on a new path and the way is obscure before me. I need you. Your hand in mine would give me the courage I require.
Do you remember how you warned me of dangers when I reviewed Miss Addams’s book? You, too, were a prophet. Let me tell you how it all came about. The other day I wrote up Mme. Adam’s Romance of My Childhood and Youth (Addams and Adam—the name has a fatality for me), and took occasion to make it the text of a tremendous preachment against our latter-day Simony,—as well it might be, for Mme. Adam grew up in the thirties and forties when France was a huge seething caldron in which all these modern notions were brewing together. And unfortunately we are just beginning now where France left off a score of years ago. You have already seen the review, no doubt, and it is superfluous to repeat its argument. But for my own justification to you I want to quote a few sentences from the book. You disdained to make any reply to my letter on Lyman Abbott, and I fear you have grown weary of the whole subject; but certainly you will be interested in what I am copying out for you now. In one of her chapters, then, Mme. Adam writes:
Nature, Science, Humanity, are the three terms of initiation. First comes nature, which rules everything; then the revelations of nature, revelations which mean science—that is to say, phenomena made clear in themselves and observed by man; and lastly, the appropriation of phenomena for useful social purposes.... There is no error in nature, no perversity in man; evil comes only from society.... He [Mme. Adam’s father] delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily explain.... They [these humanitarian socialists] resembled my father. Their doubts—and they had many!—were of too recent a date to have dried up their souls; they no longer believed in a divine Christ; they still believed in a human one. They worshipped that mysterious Science, which replaced for them the supernatural, and which had not then brought all its brutality to light in crushing man under machinery.
Could anything be more illuminating than that? Does it not set forth the close cousinship of humanitarianism with socialism and the fungous growth of the two out of the mouldering ruins of faith and the foul reek of a sensuous philosophy? And do you not see why any surrender to this modern cult of human comfort means the indefinite postponement of that fresh-dawning ideal which shall bring life to literature and art and evoke once more the golden destiny of man?
Well, this morning the particular Simon Magus who rules The Gazette walked into my office and, after some preliminary sparring, came out with a complaint which I knew had been preparing in his brain for some time. It seems that he had already been deluged with letters about my heretical attack on Miss Addams, and now a new storm had begun over my further delinquencies. He kindly told me that my views were a hundred years behind the age and that they were doing injury to the paper. Against the latter charge I had no defence, and immediately capitulated. To cut a disagreeable tale short, I anticipated his purpose and offered to make way for some man who would better harmonise with the benevolent policy of the paper. The first of the month comes in four days, and then I shall be thrown once again on my own resources. The shock, though expected, is a little disconcerting; for at times a man grows weary and discouraged in fighting against the perpetual buffeting of the current. But most of all I am wondering how my independence will affect the hopes that were beginning to colour my dreams. Dear Jessica, you will not forsake me now; you will put away your perversity and love me simply and unreservedly? There are difficulties before me, I know; but I am not afraid if only my heart is at peace. I am free, and if there is any power in my brain, any skill in my right hand, I will make such a pother that the world shall hear me. I will not die till I am heard. And so I ask you to help-me. With your love I shall be made bold, and no opposition and no repeated reverses shall trouble me. And in the end your happiness is in my making.
Indeed, your box of little things for Jack made Olympian merriment in Newspaper Row, for several men were in my office when I opened it. Jack is ten years old, small for his age, but quietly precocious. I cannot write more of him now. Address your next letter not to the office but to——; and when I open that letter will it bring me joy or grief? Your joy may cast a ruddy light on my path, but nothing that you can say will shake me in my firm resolve. No sorrow shall hinder me, but, oh, happy Heart! I, too, long for happiness.
XXVIII