CHAPTER XXXIII
“Hope evermore and believe, O man; for e’en as thy thoughtSo are the things that thou see’st; e’en as thy hope and belief.”—Arthur Hugh Clough.
“Hope evermore and believe, O man; for e’en as thy thoughtSo are the things that thou see’st; e’en as thy hope and belief.”—Arthur Hugh Clough.
“Hope evermore and believe, O man; for e’en as thy thoughtSo are the things that thou see’st; e’en as thy hope and belief.”—Arthur Hugh Clough.
“Hope evermore and believe, O man; for e’en as thy thought
So are the things that thou see’st; e’en as thy hope and belief.”
—Arthur Hugh Clough.
Janet worked out a new theory of life. For a time she had ceased to form opinions, and I had rejoiced in seeing her ideas driven like dead leaves before the first healthy emotion of her life. Now she drew herself together and deluded herself into the belief that she had a new philosophy.
“The trouble with us all is,” she remarked sententiously to me one day, “that we are always trying to convince God of our perfect intellectual clearness in matters religious, while all the time God, ‘if there be a God,’ knows perfectly well that we haven’t the means of getting it. Hewants the kind of answer that we can give, not the kind that we cannot give.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
“Action,” she answered, “determination toward good, even when we cannot understand the whole scheme of things.”
I watched the girl’s quickly changing face with much admiration and with some amusement. Once she had mistaken her peculiar moods for speculative thought; now she was mistaking her thought of the Lad for a system of philosophy. She had translated her lover’s personality into ethics.
“We keep asking questions,” she went on, “and thinking that there will be an answer. I suppose that God wishes us to answer our own questions in deeds and not in words.”
I liked her new ideas because they made her happy. Intrinsically they were better than the old ones. But I fear that I should have liked any thought of hers that made her face look like that. There was a light in it that I had never seen before.
“I think,” she said, looking up at me wistfully, “that all the sickening sense I had of defeat—defeat before the battle—was because I stood waiting for a voice from heaven to tell me what the outcome was to be. I forgot that the voice must speak through my own lips.”
“Isn’t your new gospel of action very much like the Lad’s?” I insinuated.
“I suppose it is,” said Janet, slowly; “and yet, and yet the Lad is a positivist. He insists that the present world is the limit of all our knowledge, perhaps of all our action.”
“And you do not?”
“I don’t know,” said the girl. “I sometimes wonder if the will to be and to be good cannot rule in another world as well as in this. Perhaps the will needs another world to realize the hope of this.”
“Won’t you explain?” I begged meekly. I sometimes find it difficult to understand the wisdom of the young.
“I mean,” she said, “that we speak of God and love and immortality, and ask ifour ideas can be true. But God and love and immortality are not to be had for the asking. They are true in so far as we make them true.”
“So you have solved the problem of the Sphinx?” I said. “It is a good solution; that is, as good as any mere thought about life can be.”
“I suppose,” continued Janet, “that we are bound to answer back in act to every question we can ask. We must rise to the level of our loftiest inquiry. The first suspicion we get of immortality makes us responsible for it. Henceforth we must win it for ourselves.”
“O Socrates!” I interrupted, “how did you learn so much in so short a time?”
“Don’t stop me,” laughed the girl. “You may never have another chance to listen to words of optimism from my lips. Listen: if we can even wonder whether love works back of all the hurt of life, aren’t we bound to act as if it were true?”
“You must found a school,” I said. “Let me be your first disciple.”
“No,” said Janet. “It has all been said a great many times, but I never understood it before. The only thing that puzzles me is the Lad.”
“That is simply fair. You puzzle him as well,” I murmured.
“His renouncement of belief in another world to work in makes him more eager to do well the work of this one. His denial of a life to be gives him an added interest in this.”
I assented, and in doing so felt that I was making a generous admission. I was usually impatient with the pseudo-scientific thought of my agnostic friends.
“But remember that positivism would have a different effect on a nature less rare,” I added by way of caution.
“There is something very beautiful in it, something fine and self-controlled, yet very sad,” said Janet, with a look of tenderness creeping into her eyes. “He so longs to find the most exquisite adjustment of this life to its ends, to make it a perfect artistic whole. And I cannotmake him say, with my pet philosopher,” said the girl, looking up with one of her sweet, sudden smiles, “‘God, love, and immortality shall be, for I am!’”