Love's Pilgrimage Part 11

I see that it takes four or five days for letters to come and go between us; and so if we write often, our letters will be crossing. Four or five days is time enough for us to change our moods a dozen times, so our correspondence will be apt to be complicated!

III

MY DEAREST THYRSIS:

It has worried me somewhat to-day that you might be utterly disappointed in the letter I wrote you. It was a wild jumble of words, but I was fighting all sorts of uncomfortable things within me. To-day I have been anything but despairing, and have "gone at" the German. In fact, I quite lost myself in it, and believe I understand thoroughly the construction of the first poem. Wonderful accomplishment!

Your words, as I read them again, dear heart, are full of a great beauty and fire and energy, and I only hope you may keep them always. I believe that the possibility of the marriage we both desire, depends greatly if not entirely on _your_ sternness. You must realize it.

I cannot tell with the proper conditions and training what energy I might be able to acc.u.mulate for myself, but in the meanwhile the thing that makes me most wretched is my utter incapacity at times, and my inability to share with you your work. In my weaker and more helpless moods, I ask myself with a pang, whether I ought to go with you at all, when I cannot help you. But I must stop fuming. I have come out of my mudpuddle for good and for all, and that is the main consideration. I don't intend to go back.

We must not think of each other in any way but as co-workers in a great labor; we must simply know that our love is rooted deeply, and the harder we work the more firm it will be. There is no reason why we should not go to the altar with just this sternness, and from now on preserve this att.i.tude until the day when we have earned the right to consider what love means. Can you do it? I will prove to you that I can.

IV

MY DEAR THYRSIS:

I am trying very dreadfully, and go away alone and pound at the German as if my life depended upon it. I go to bed every night with a tight feeling in my head, but I do not mind, as I take it for a guarantee that I have not rested.

And oh, my dearest, dearest and best, I am trying not to think of you too much--that is too much in a way that does not help me to study. But I love you really, yes, truly, and I know I would follow you anywhere.

I am not particularly joyful, but then I do not expect to be for a great many years.

V

DEAR THYRSIS:

Only a few words. I have been hovering to-day between spurts of hopeful energy, and the most indescribable despair. It positively freezes my heart, and I have been on the point of writing to you and telling you to relieve yourself of the responsibility of me. The reason is because it seems a perfectly Herculean task to read "Egmont". I have to look up words in the dictionary until I am absolutely so weary I care not about anything; and then I think of you, and what you are able to do, and at one word from you I would give up all idea of marrying you.

I tell you I am up and down in this mood. Great G.o.d, I could work all day and all night if I could do what you do, but to strain at iron fetters--a snail! Oh, I cannot tell you--I simply groan under it. At such times I have no more idea of marrying you than of journeying to the moon. I repeat to you, to be constantly choked back, while you are rapidly advancing, will kill me. I don't know what you will say to this, but it is intolerable, unendurable, to me. When I think of your ability and mine, I simply laugh about it--Thyrsis, it is simply ridiculous. I do not ask you to take me with you, Thyrsis.

Do you wonder at my writing all this? You would not if you understood.

It is so hard for me to keep any joy in my heart, and I get tired of repeated failures, that is all. I thought I must write you this, and have it over with. This is the style of letter I have always torn up, but this time it goes. I think I will practice the piano now, and try to get some gladness into my soul again.

VI

MY DEAR, DEAR THYRSIS:

There is a dreadful sort of letter which I wrote you last night which I haven't sent you yet.

I have been studying, or trying to most of the day, and my mind has wandered most painfully. There were two days in which I seemed to have hold of myself, but with an effort that was a fearful strain. I must try so, that it almost kills me, if I wish to accomplish even a little of what I ought. The heat here is almost insupportable, it is stifling, and I spent an hour or so in the water this afternoon.

And the thought is always torture to me--that you are accomplis.h.i.+ng so much more than I! I was thinking of your letters to-night, and I recalled some words that seemed to speak more of your love for me. Oh, Thyrsis, if your letters are fiery and pa.s.sionate, is it for love of _me_ that they are? I'm almost afraid at times, when I read your letters--when you tell me of the kind of woman you _want_ to love.

I at present am certainly not she. And do you know that when we are married we shall be united forever? I don't know why I write you these things, they are not at all inspiring thoughts to me.

And yet I was able to go in swimming this afternoon, and forget everything and frolic around as happily as any water-baby!

VII

MY DEAR CORYDON:

I came off to write my poem, but I have been thinking about you, and I must write a long letter. It is one of the kind that you do not like.

In the first place, you complain of the contradictions in my letters. I am sorry. I live so, struggling always with what is not best in me, and continually falling down. Also, in this matter I am an utter stranger, groping my way; and there is an element of pa.s.sion in it, a dangerous element, which leads me continually astray.

I can only say that in my ideal of love, which is utter love and spiritual love, I think of living my life with you in entire nakedness of soul. Therefore, I shall always be before you exactly as I should be by myself. And I shall write you now exactly what I have been thinking, what is hard and unkind in it, as well as the rest. You will learn to know me as a man far from perfect, often going astray himself, often feeling wrong things, often leading you astray and making you wretched.

But behind all this there is the thing often lost sight of, but always present--the iron duty that I have, and the force in me which drives me to it.

All this morning I have been thinking of my book, losing myself in it and filling myself with its glory. This afternoon I fell to thinking about us; and thoughts which have been lurking in my mind for a long time got the upper hand for the first time. They were that I did not love you as I ought to, that I could not; that the love which I felt was a thing from my own heart, and that it had carried me away because I was anxious to persuade myself I had found my ideal upon earth; that you _could_ not satisfy the demands upon life that I made, and that if I married you it would be to make you wretched, and myself as well; that you had absolutely nothing of the things that I needed, and that the life which your nature required was entirely different from mine; that you had no realization of the madness that was driving me, could find and give me none of the power I needed; and that I ought to write and tell you this, no matter what it cost--that I owed it to the sacred possibility of my own soul, to live alone if I could live better alone.

And when I had said these words, I felt a sense of relief, because they were haunting me, and had been for a long time.

How they will affect you I cannot tell, it depends upon deep your love for me is; certainly they mean for me that _my_ love is not deep, that you have not made yourself necessary to me. I think that in that last phrase I put the whole matter in its essence--you have not _bound_ yourself to me; I am always struggling to keep my love firm and right, to hold myself to you. The result is that there is no food for my soul in the thought of our love, in my thought of you; and therefore, I am continually dissatisfied and doubting, continually feeling the difference between the love I have dreamed and our love.

I tried to think the matter out, and get to the very bottom of it. The first thing that came to me on the other side was your absolute _truth_; your absolute devotion to what was right and n.o.ble in our ideal.

So that, as I was thinking, I suddenly stopped short with this statement--"If you cannot find right love with that girl, it must be because you do not honor love, or care for it." And then I thought of your helplessness, of your lack of training and opportunity for growth; and I told myself how absurd it was of me to expect satisfying love from you--when all that I knew about in life, and thought of, was entirely unknown to you. I realized that I was a man who had tasted more or less of all knowledge, and had an infinite vision of knowledge yet before him, and an infinite hunger for it; and that you were a school-girl, with all of a school-girl's tasks on your hands. So I said to myself that the reason for the dissatisfaction was a fault of my own, that it had come from my own blindness. I had gone wrong in my att.i.tude to you; I had failed in my sternness and my high devotion to perfection; I had contented myself with lesser things, had come down from my best self, and had failed to make you see what a task was before you, if you ever meant to know my best self. You perceive that this is a return to my old-time att.i.tude; I am sorry if it makes you wretched, but I cannot help it. It is a surgical operation that must be borne. I shall not make it necessary again, I hope.

Now, dear Corydon, I am not trying to choose pleasant words in this letter, this is the way I talk to _myself_. And if anything good comes from our love, it will be because of this letter. I challenge what is n.o.blest in you to rise to meet the truth of it. I should not care to write to you if I did not feel that it would.

You have had a possibility offered to you, and because you are very hungry for life you have clasped it to you, placed all your happiness in it. The possibility is the love of a man whose heart has been filled with the fire of genius. There are few men whom life takes hold of as it does me, who sacrifice themselves for their duty as I do, who demand _experience_--knowledge, power, beauty--as I do. There are very few men who will wrest out of existence as much as I will, or know and have as much of life. I am a boy just now, and only beginning to live; but I have my purpose in hand, and I know that if I am given health and life, there is nothing that men have known that I shall not know, nothing that is done in the world that I shall not do, or try to. I have a strong physique, and I labor day and night, and always shall. I shall always be hungry and restless, always dissatisfied with myself, and with everything about me, and acting and feeling most of the time like a person haunted by a devil. I make no apologies to you for the conceit of what I am saying; it is what I think of myself, without caring what other people think. I know that I have a tremendous temperament, tremendous powers hidden within me, and they have got to come out. When they do, the world will know what I know now.

Now Corydon, as you understand, I dream love absolute, and would scorn any other kind. I can master my pa.s.sion, if it be that upon earth there is no woman willing or able to go with me to the last inch of my journey. I dream a life-companion to follow wherever my duty drives me; to feel all the desperateness of desire that I feel, to be stern and remorseless as I must be, wild and savage as I must be; to race through knowledge with me and to share my pa.s.sion for truth with me; a woman with whom I need have no shame in the duty of my genius! As I tell you, if I marry you, I expect to give myself to you as your own heart; and then I think of the gentle and mild existence you have led!

It is very hard for me even to tell about my life, or to explain this thing that drives me mad. But I am writing this letter to you for the purpose of making clear to you that there are two alternatives before you, and that you must choose one or the other and stick by it, and bear the consequences. It is painful to me to think that I have fascinated you by what opportunities I have, even by what power and pa.s.sion and talents I have, and filled you with a hunger for me--when really you do not realize at all what I am, or what I must be, and when what I have to do will terrify you. I write in the thought of terrifying you _now_, and making you give up this red-hot iron that you are trying to hold on to; or else to show you my life so plainly that never afterwards can you blame me, or shrink back except by your own fault.

You must not blame me for writing these words, for wondering if a woman, if _any_ woman has power to stand what I need to do. And when I talk to you about giving me up, you must not think that is cold, but know that it is my faithfulness to my vision, which is the one thing to which I owe any duty in the world. Nor is it right that you should expect to be essential to me, when I have labored to be all to myself. You could become necessary to me in the years to come; if I marry you to-day I shall marry you for what you are to become, and for that _alone_--at any rate if I am true to myself.

If you are to be my wife you are to be my soul--to live my soul's life and bear its pain. You are to understand that I talk to you as I talk to myself, call you the names I call myself, and if you cry, give you up in disgust; that I am to deny you all pleasure as I do myself, and what G.o.d knows will be ten thousand times harder, let you take pleasure, and then spring up in the very midst of it--you know what I mean! That I am to be ever dissatisfied with you, ever inconsiderate of your feelings, and ever declaring that you are failing! That however much I may love you, I am to be your conscience, and therefore keep you--just about as you are now, miserable! You told me that you would gladly be whipped to learn to live; and this can be the only thing to happen to you.

You must understand why I act in this way. I am a weak and struggling man, with a thousand temptations; and when I marry you, you will be the greatest temptation of all. You are a beautiful girl, and I love you, and every instinct of my nature drives me to you; for me to live with you without kissing you or putting my arms about you, will remain always difficult. It will be so for you, as for me, and it will always be our danger, and always make us wretched. Your soul rises in you as I write this, and you say (as you've said before) that if I offered to kiss you after it, it would be an insult. But only wait until we meet!

This is the one thing that has become clear to me: just as soon as there comes the least thought of satisfaction in our love, just so soon does it cease to satisfy my best self. You cannot satisfy my best self, you do not even know it; and if it were a question of that, I should never dream of marrying you! I love you for this and for this alone--because you are an undeveloped soul, the dream of whose infinite possibilities is my one delight in the matter. I think that you are _perfect_ in character, that you are truth itself; and therefore, no matter how helpless you may be, I have no fear of failing to make you "all the world to me", provided only that I am not false to my ideal. You must know from what I have written before that I _can_ love, that I do know what love is, and that you may trust me. I am not trying to degrade pa.s.sion--I simply see how pa.s.sion throws the burden on the woman, and therefore it is utterly a crime with us--the least thought of it! I ought to consider you as a school-girl, really just that; and instead of that I write you love letters!

I tell you there is nothing more hateful for me to look back upon than that childish business of ours, that time when we went upstairs that we might kiss each other unseen. I tell you, it revolts my soul, from love and from you! I should be perfectly willing to take all the blame--I do; only I have led you to like that (or to act as if you did) and I must stop it. Can you not understand how hateful it is to me to think of making you anything that I should be disgusted with?

I expect you to read over this letter until you realize that it is, every word of it, completely true and n.o.ble, and until you can write me so. You and I are to feel ourselves two school-children and live just so. It is not usual for school-children to marry, but that we dare upon the strength of our purpose, and in defiance of all counsel, and of every precedent. We are to feel that we owe our duty to our ideal; and that simply _because_ of the strength and pa.s.sion of our love for each other, we demand perfection, each of the other. My setting this stern challenge before you is nothing but my determination to give you my right love, to demand that you be a perfect woman.

I promise you therefore no quarter; I shall make no sacrifice of my ideal for your sake. As I wrote you, I mean to be absolutely one with you, and I expect you to be the same. You shall have (if you wish it) all of my soul--I shall live my life with you and think all my thoughts aloud--study to give you _everything_ that I have. And G.o.d only, who knows my heart, knows what utter love for you lies in those words, what utter trust of you--how I think of you as being purity and holiness itself. To offer to take any other being into my soul, to lay bare all the secret places of it to its gaze, all the weaknesses as well as all the strength, and all that is vain as well as all that is sacred! You cannot know how I feel about my heart, but this you may know, that no one else has had a glimpse of it, you are the first and the last; and so sure am I of you that I dare to say it, _all_ my life will I live in your presence, and trust to your sympathy and truth--and feel that I am false to love if I do not. If there were anything in my heart so foul that I feared to speak of it, I should give you that first, as the sacrifice of love; or any vanity or foible--such things are really hardest to have others know, so great is our conceit.

If I could talk to you to-night, I should do just as I did up on the hill in the moonlight--frighten you, and make you wonder if there was _any_ woman who wished to bear such a burden; and perhaps the saddest thing of all to me is that I do not bear it--instead I bear the gnawing of a conscience bitter and ashamed of itself. And could you bear _that_ burden? For Corydon, as I look at myself to-night, I am before G.o.d, a coward and a dastard! I have not done my work! I have not borne the pain He calls me to bear, I have not wrested out the strength He put in my secret heart! And here I am chattering, _talking_ about work to you!

And these things are like a nightmare to me; they turn all my life's happiness to gall. And you are taking upon yourself this same burden--coming to help me to get rid of it. Or if you do not wish to, for G.o.d's sake, and mine, and yours, don't come near me--you have come too near as it is! Can you not see that when I am face to face with these fearful things--and you come and ask me to give my life to you, to wors.h.i.+p you with the best faculties I possess--that I have no right to say yes?

You once told me you were happy because I called you "mein guter Geist, mein bess'res Ich"; well, you are not in the least that. The name that I give you, and that you may keep, is "the beautiful possibility of a soul". Remember a phrase I told you at the very beginning of our love, of the peril of "ceasing to love perfection and coming to love a woman."

And read Sh.e.l.ley's sad note to "Epipsychidion"!

VIII

Dear Corydon:

You tell me in your last letter that you are leaving all who love you; and you ask "How do you know that because you love beauty, you will love _me_?"