Finivi. The last word of my History of Humanitarianism is written, and it only remains now to see this labour of months—of years, rather—through the press. I know not what your fate will be, little book, in this heedless, multitudinous-hurried world; I know but this, that I have spoken a true word as it has been given me to see the truth. That any great result will come of it, I dare not expect. Only I pray that, if the message falls unregarded, it will be because, as she said, my bells ring too high, and not for want of veracity and courage in the utterance. After all it is good to remember the brave words of William Penn to his friend Sydney: “Thou hast embarked thyself with them that seek, and love, and choose the best things; and number is not weight with thee.” I have tried to show how from one ideal to another mankind has passed to this present sham ideal, or no-ideal, wherein it welters as in a sea of boundless sentimentalism. I have tried to show that because men to-day have no vision beyond material comfort and the science of material things—that for this reason their aims and actions are divided between the sickly sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid one’s self once for all of the canting unreason of “equality and brotherhood,” to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make noble and beautiful and free one’s own life. Sodom would have been saved had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our hope to-day depends primarily, not on the elevation of the masses (though this too were desirable), but on the ability of a few men to hold fast the ancient truth and hand it down to those who come after. So shall beauty and high thought not perish from the earth—“Doing righteousness, make glad your heart!”
And for my own sake it is good that the work is finished. It has overmastered my understanding too long and caused me to judge all things by their relation to this one truth or untruth. It has debarred me from that sereine contemplation de l’univers, wherein my peace and better growth were found. I am free once again to look upon things as they are in themselves.
LX
FROM PHILIP’S DIARY
I went yesterday afternoon to see the Warren collection of pictures which has been sent here for sale at auction, and one little landscape impressed me so deeply that all last night in my dreams I seemed to be walking unaccompanied in the waste places of the artist’s vision. It was a picture by Rousseau; a Sunset it was called, though something in the wide look of expectancy and the purity of the light reminded me more of early dawn than of evening; one waited before it for the unfolding of a great event. A flat, marshy land stretched back to the horizon, where it blended almost indistinguishably into the grey curtain of the sky. A deserted road wound into the distance, passing at one spot a low boulder and farther on a little expanse of dark water, and vanishing then into the far-off heavens. Overhead, through the level clouds, the light pierced at intervals, wan and cold, save near the horizon where a single spot of crimson gave hint of the rising or the setting sun. There lay over the whole a sense of inexpressible desertion, as if it were almost a trespass for the human eye to intrude upon the scene—as if some sacred powers of the hidden world had withdrawn hither for the accomplishment of a solemn mystery. As I stood before it, a great emotion broke over me, a feeling of extraordinary expansion, like that which comes to one in a close room when a broad window is thrown suddenly open to the fresh air and to far-vanishing vistas. I know little or nothing of the artist’s life, but I am sure that he had looked upon this desert scene with the same emotion of enlargement as mine, only far greater and purer. And I know that his heart in its loneliness had comprehended the infinite solitudes of nature and through that act of comprehension was lifted up with a strange and austere exultation. For, gazing upon these wide silences, he learned that the indignities and conflicts and weary ambitions of life meant little to him, as the storms and tumultuous forces of the earth mean nothing to the heart of Nature, and in that lesson was his peace. One concern only was his,—to wrest from the impenetrable mystery of the world an image of everlasting beauty, and to set forth this image to others whose vision was not yet purged of trouble.
LXI
FROM PHILIP’S DIARY
I can rest no more to-night, for I have been visited by strange dreams. It seemed to me in my sleep that I wandered desolate in a desolate land—not in wide waste places as I dreamed after seeing Rousseau’s picture, but in some wilderness of trees where the light from a thin moon drifted rarely through the slow-waving boughs. And always as I wandered, I knew that somewhere afar off in that dim forest my beloved whom I had deserted lay in an agony of suspense, waiting for me and calling to me through the night. It seemed almost as if the years of a lifetime passed, and still I sought and could not find her—only shadows met me and fantastic shapes out of the darkness greeted me with staring eyes. And, oh, I thought, if this long agony of solitude troubles her heart as it troubles mine and she perish in fear because I have forsaken her! My distress grew to be more than I could bear. And then in a loud voice I cried to her: “Fear not, beloved; be at peace until I come!” I think I must actually have called out in my sleep, for I awoke suddenly and started up with the sound still ringing in my ears. Ah, Jessica, Jessica, what have I done! My own misery has lain so heavily upon me that it has not occurred to me to imagine what you too must have suffered. Indeed, the wonder of your love has been to me so incomprehensibly sweet that the notion of any actual suffering on your part has never really entered my thought. My own need I understood—can it be that our separation has caused the same weary emptiness in your days that has made the word peace a mockery to me? Can it even be that while I have sought refuge and a kind of forgetfulness in the domination of my work, you have been left a prey to unrelieved despondency? You accused me once of conscientious selfishness—have I made you a victim of that sin? Idle questions all, for I have come to a great awakening and a sure determination. Dear Jessica, it was this very day one year ago that you walked into my office, bringing with you hope and joy like the scent of fresh flowers on the breath of summer—making as it were a dayspring within my sombre life more filled with glorious promise than the dawn that even now begins to break against my windows. It was doubtless the half-conscious recollection of this anniversary that troubled my dream—dream I call it, and yet there is a conviction strong upon me that somehow my spirit, or some emanation of my spirit, was actually abroad this night seeking yours, that somehow, when I cried aloud, the sound of my voice penetrated to you through the darkness and distance. Be at peace, beloved; for this rising sun shall not set until I am with you; and no power of fanaticism, nor any brooding phantasy of mine, shall ever draw us apart. Fear not, beloved; be at peace till I come.
LXII
JESSICA TO PHILIP