Jessica, the Brave.
P.S.—What do you think, our little forest is for sale. And oh, Philip, if some vandal buys my dear trees and cuts them down, my very life will die of grief! They are my brothers. And if a man built a house there and asked me to marry him, I would, if he were as ugly as old Jeremiah! (I suppose all the prophets were like this, their writings produce that impression!) And my father would consent, even if the bridegroom were a heathen instead of a prophet. For he would be obliged to attend religious services at Morningtown, and father does not believe any man can long remain under the drippings of his sanctuary without being forgiven. And I do not either. God would have mercy upon him somehow!
XXXIII
PHILIP TO JESSICA
Your letter, dearest Jessica, and your father’s came by the same post, and the sensation they gave me was as if some moral confusion had befallen the elements and summer were mingled with winter in the same sky. Not that his letter was anything but kind and dignified, but it seemed to remove you and your life so far away from me. I confess I had some fears that he might insist on the little we have seen or, as the world judges, know of each other; it had not occurred to me that my “infidelity” would block my path to happiness—so little do the people I commonly meet reck of that matter. I have been accusing the world all along of indifference to the spirit and to theology, and now, by a sort of poetical irony, I am blocked in my progress toward happiness by meeting one who adheres to an old-world belief in these things. The burden of his reply was in these words: “I cannot conceive that my daughter should give her heart to a man who was not strong in the faith in which she has herself been nurtured. I would gladly be otherwise convinced, but from all I can learn you are of those who trust rather in the pride of intellect than in the humility of Christian faith. ”Why, my fair Jesuit, have you concealed your love as well as this! I think no one could live in the same house with me without hearing the bird that sings in my breast. You must tell your father the whole truth.
Meanwhile I will write to him as best I can, but the real debate I must leave until I come to Morningtown. And how shall I persuade him that I have faith or that my faith is in any way an equivalent for his belief in the Christian dogma? Will he listen to me if I say that a man may believe the whole catechism and yet have no faith? Mankind, as I regard them, are divided into two pretty distinct classes: those to whom the visible world is real and the invisible world unreal or at best a shadow of the visible, and those to whom this visible realm with all its life is mere illusion whereas the spirit alone is the eternal reality. Faith is just this perception of the illusion enwrapping all these phenomena that to those without faith seem so real; faith is the voluntary turning away of the spirit from this illusion toward the infinite reality. It is because I find among the men of to-day no perception of this illusion that I deny the existence of faith in the world. It is because men have utterly lost the sense of this illusion that religion has descended into this Simony of the humanitarians. How shall I tell your father this? I think we should do better to discuss household economy than religion.
Just now I am forcibly detained in New York by a number of petty duties, but in a few days I shall set forth on my second pilgrimage to Morningtown. Shall I have any wit to persuade your father that my “infidelity” is not the unpardonable sin, or that my love for you is sufficient to cover even that sin and a host of others? And how will Jessica meet me? She will not look now, I trust, for that cloven hoof which I never had and those ass’s ears which, alas! I did flourish so portentously. Why, Jessica, according to your own words you will have a strange double lover to greet, and I think it would be mathematically correct if you gave two kisses in return for every one. It will be a new rendering of Catullus’s Da Basia.
And so your little forest is for sale. Could I buy that faerie land, sweetheart, and build therein a hidden house and over its threshold carry a sweet bride! Ah, you have rewritten the sacred story of Eden. Not for the love of woman should I be driven from the happy garden, but brought by woman’s grace from the desert into the circle of perfect Paradise. Together we should hearken to the singing of birds; together, we should bend over the bruised flowers and look up into the green majesty of the trees; and sometimes, it might be, as we walked together hand in hand in the cool of the evening,—sometimes, it might be, we should hear the voice of our own happiness speaking to us from the shadows and deem that it was God. May angels and ministers of grace enfold you in their mercy for this dream of rapture you have given me! It shall feed my imagination in dreams until I come to you and learn in your arms the more “sober certainty of waking bliss.”
Yet, withal, would you be willing to forego your “brothers,” as you call the trees, and this vision of hidden peace? Would it pain you to leave them and come with me into this great solitude of people which we call New York? How in that idyllic retreat should I keep my heart and mind on the stern purpose I have set before me? There, indeed, the world and all the concerns of mankind would sink so far from my care, would fade into the mist of such utter illusion, that I know not how I could write with seriousness about them. I need not the happiness of love’s isolation, but the rude contact of affairs, yet with love’s encouragement, to hold me within practical ideas. So it seems to me now, but I would not mar the beauty of your life. Of this and many more things we will talk together when I come.
I have given up my old comfortable quarters in the——and have taken a couple of cheap rooms here at——. For some months I shall not be writing for money and I wished not to eat unnecessarily into my small savings. One room is a mere closet where I sleep, the other is pretty large, but still crowded immoderately with my books. I am hard at work on a book I have had in mind for several years,—the history and significance of humanitarianism. I need not tell you what the gist of that magnum opus is to be, and, dear sceptic, trust me it will be put into such a form as to stir up a pother whether with or without ultimate results. I have learned enough from the despised trade of journalism to manage that. When I return from Morningtown I shall give myself up utterly to composition. Two or three months ought to suffice for the work, for the material is already well in hand; and at the end of that time my pen shall turn to making money again. I have no anxiety about gaining a modest income—and can you imagine what that means to you and me?