Life’s boundless extension and endless progression was ever the uppermost thought in Mrs. Doring’s mind. In it she found consolation for all ills, as well as explanation of them. She pitied those still blind to this tremendous fact. What had they to uphold them in the terrible conflict we make of life?
What of the literature that only reaches the grave and there halts, unable to go further? Is it not the literature of children, useful only to amuse and entertain them in idle hours? She had adored the art of letters, had made a fetich of it, paying homage to its great names and walking in its fair gardens with reverent steps. Now she asked herself what literature had done for the voiceless army of the dead. What representation had they in its pages? The dead, the sacred dead, the beloved dead, what had letters done to bridge the stream that separates them from the living?
Poets had sent them to a far-off heaven or plunged them into a flaming hell to suit their moods and meters. Romancers had used them as spectres to come upon the scene at inopportune moments and treat their readers to thrills. They were flippantly spoken of as “spooks,” “ghosts,” “apparitions,” and “supernatural appearances.” They were good stock in certain brands of stories which nobody believed in, and occasionally they were allowed to have a bit of business on the stage. Witless witlings had sneered at their claims to recognition, and writers of many minds, however they differed on other points, were generally united in the effort to keep the dead, one and all, from rising.
Authors of romances found death a convenience in disposing of inconvenient characters of their own creation. When they could not manage them effectively any other way, they slaughtered them remorsely, and that was the end of them; that put them out of both writers’ and readers’ way for all time. Not even the good always escaped this doom. If readers could be entertainingly harrowed and wrought upon by the demise of the most angelic heroine, she had to die, and that finished her for friends and foes. At the grave everything ended. There love laid its treasures and turned hopelessly away; and there hate sheathed its poniard in satisfaction, having reached its extreme limit.
Now Cartice Doring saw clearly that there are no finalities here; that the grave is not the end; that it never imprisoned a human soul. She saw that a new literature must come forth to satisfy minds of larger growth, which look upon death, not as a finality, but a change of costume and the opening of a new act. And this literature must go to the point, straight and clear; it must seek the solution of life’s problem and not merely amuse and beguile travelers on the journey.
Many a night, while she walked home after an evening’s talk with her unseen friends, she felt in touch with all the universe. Nothing was far off, not even the stars, which looked down upon earth with tender human sympathy in their bright faces. She feared nothing, and knew no loneliness, feeling herself attended by an innumerable company. Already she believed that what Kant said will yet be proved, “that the human soul, even in this life, is by an indissoluble communion connected with all the immaterial natures of the spirit world, acting upon them, and receiving impressions from them.”
Now she understood more clearly the meaning of this statement by our greatest philosopher, Emerson: “every man is an inlet to the Divine mind and to all of that mind.” Yes, and an outlet, also.
Now, now she began to see that “the spirit of man is a personal limitation of the supreme spirit,” as another philosopher says; that “God is the all of man’s life, the power of man at bottom being the power of God.”
Now she could understand that “what we call the material universe is but the manifestation of infinite Deity to our finite minds”; and that “our individual self is found,” as the ancient wisdom of the East, and likewise Jesus and Paul, affirms, “included in the contents of the Absolute Being or Self.”
“Eternal Being mirrors itself in every existence,” she murmured reverently; “Eternal Being, and we are it.”