‘Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!Piercing sweet by the river!Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!The sun on the hill forgot to die,And the lilies reviv’d, and the dragon-flyCame back to dream on the river.‘Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,To laugh as he sits by the river,Making a poet out of a man.The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—For the reed which grows nevermore againAs a reed with the reeds in the river.’”
Thyrsis paused. “Do you see what it means?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Corydon, “I see.”
“‘Making a poet out of a man!’ That is one of the finest lines I know. And that’s the way I feel about it—I have given up all other duties in the world. If I can write one book, or even one poem, that will be an inspiration to men in the future—why, then I have done far more than I could do by a lifetime given to helping people around me.”
“I never understood before,” said Corydon.
“That is the idea the minstrel tries to voice to the princess. At first he pours out his soul to her; but then, when he finds that she loves him, he is afraid, and tries to persuade her not to come with him. He tells her how lonely and stern his life is; and she has been born to a gentle life—she has her station and her duty in the world. But the more he pleads the hardness of his life, the more she sees she must go with him. Even if the end be death to her, still she will be an inspiration to him, and give wings to his music. ‘Be silent,’ she tells him—‘let me fling myself away for a song! To do one deed that the world remembers, to utter one word that lives forever—that is worth all the failure and the agony that can come to one woman in her lifetime!’”
Corydon sat with her hands clasped. “Yes,” she said, “that is the way she would feel!”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” remarked the other. “I must make it real; and I’ve been afraid about it. Would she really go with him?”
“She would go if she loved him,” said Corydon.
“If she loved him. But she must love his art still more.”
“She must lovehim,”said Corydon.
Thyrsis shook his head. “It would not do for her to go with him for that,” he said.
“Why not? Doesn’t he love her?”
“Yes; but he is afraid to tell her so. They dare not let that sway them.”
“I don’t understand. Why not?”
“Because personal love is a limited thing, and comparatively an ignoble thing.”
“I don’t see how there can be anything more noble than true love between a man and a woman,” declared Corydon.
“It depends on what you mean by ‘true’ love,” replied Thyrsis. “If two people love each other for their own sakes, and go together, they soon come to know each other, and then they are satisfied—and their growth is at an end. What I conceive is that two people must lose themselves, and all thought of themselves, in their common love for something higher—for some great ideal, some purpose, some vision of perfection. And they seek this together, and they rejoice in finding it, each for the other; and so they have always progress and growth—they stand for something new to each other every day of their lives. To such love there is no end, and no chance of weariness or satiety.”
“I had never thought of it just so,” said the girl. “But surely there must be a personal love in the beginning.”
“I don’t know,” he responded. “I hadn’t thought about that. I’m afraid I’m impersonal by nature.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s what has puzzled me. Don’t you love human beings?”
“Not as a rule,” he confessed.
“But then—what is it you are interested in? Yourself?”
“People tell me that’s the case. And there’s a sense in which it’s true—I’m wrapped up in the thought of myself as an art-work. I’ve a certain vision of the possibilities of my own being, and I’m trying to realize it. And if I do, then I can write books and communicate it to other people, so that they can judge it, and see if it’s any better than the vision they have. It is a higher kind of unselfishness, I think.”
“I see,” said Corydon. “It’s not easy to understand.”
“No one understands it,” he replied. “People are taught that they must sacrifice themselves for others; and they do it, blindly and stupidly, and never ask if the other person is worthy of the sacrifice—and still less if they themselves have anything worth sacrificing.”
Corydon had clenched her hands suddenly. “How I hate the religion of self-sacrifice!” she cried.
“Mine is a religion of self-development,” said Thyrsis. “I am sacrificing myself for what other people ought to be.”
Section 4. They came back after a time, to the subject of love; and to the ideal of it which Thyrsis meant to set forth in the book. It was the duty of every soul to seek the highest potentiality of which it had vision; and as one did that for himself, so he did it for the person he loved. There could be no higher love than this—to treat the thing beloved as one’s self, to be perpetually dissatisfied with it, to scourge it to new endeavor, to hold it in immortal discontent.
This was a point about which they argued with eager excitement. To Thyrsis, love itself was a prize to be held before the loved one; whereas Corydon argued that love must exist before such a union could be thought of. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes shone as she maintained the thesis that the princess could not go with the minstrel unless his love was given to her irrevocably.
“If you mean by love a sense of oneness in the pursuit of an ideal, then I agree with you,” said Thyrsis. “But if you mean what love generally means—a mutual admiration, the worshipping of another personality—then I don’t.”
“And are lovers not even to be interesting to each other?” cried Corydon.
But the poet did not shrink even from that. “I don’t think a woman could be interesting to me—except in so far as she was growing. And she must always know that if she stopped growing, she would cease to be interesting. That is not a matter of anybody’s will, it seems to me—it is a fact of soul-chemistry.”
“I don’t think you will find many women to love you on that basis,” said Corydon.
“I never expected to find but one,” was Thyrsis’ reply; “and I may not find even one.”
She sat watching him for a moment. “I had never realized the sublimity of your egotism,” she said. “It would never occur to you to judge anyone else by your own standards, would it?”
“That is very well put,” laughed Thyrsis. “As a matter of fact, I have a maxim that I count all things lost in the world but my own soul.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I can depend on my own soul; and I have not yet met anything else in life of which I can say that.”
Again there was a pause. “You are as hard as iron!” exclaimed the girl.
“I am harder than anything you can find for your simile,” he answered. “I know simply that there is no force existing that can turn me from my task.”
“You might meet some woman who would fascinate you.”
“Perhaps,” he replied. “I have done things I’m ashamed of, and I’ve a wholesome fear of doing more of them. But I know that that woman, whoever she might be, would wake up some morning and find me missing.”
Then for a while he sat staring at the eddies in the pool below. “I have a vision of another kind of woman,” he said—“a woman to whom my ideal would be the same compelling force that it is to me—a living thing that would drive her, that she was both master of, and slave to, as I am. So that she would feel no fears, and ask no favors! So that she would not want mercy, nor ask pledges—but just give herself, as I give myself, and take the chances of the game. Don’t you think there may be just one such woman in the world?”
“Perhaps,” was the reply. “But then—mightn’t a woman be sure of your ideal, but not of you?”
“As to that,” said Thyrsis, “she would have to know me.
“As to that,” said Corydon, “she would have to love you.”
And Thyrsis smiled. “As in most arguments,” he said, “it’s mainly a matter of definitions.”
Section 5. At this point there came a call from the distance, and Corydon started. “There is mother,” she exclaimed. “How the afternoon has flown!”
“And must you go home now?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so,” she replied. “We have a long row.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted to advise you about books to read. You must let me help you to find what you are seeking.”
“Ah,” said Corydon, “if you only will!”
“I will do anything I can,” he said. “I am ashamed of not having helped you before.”
They had risen and started towards the house. “Can’t you come to-morrow, and we can talk it over,” he said.
“But I thought you were going to work,” she objected.
“I can spare another day,” he replied. “A rest won’t hurt me, I know. And it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you this afternoon.”
So they settled it; and Thyrsis saw them off in the boat, and then he went back to the little cabin.
On the steps he stood still. “Corydon!” he muttered. “Little Corydon!”
That was always the way he thought of her; not only because he had known her when she was a child, but because this expressed his conception of her—she was so gentle and peaceable and meek. She was now eighteen, and he was only twenty, but he felt towards her as a grandfather might. But now had come this new revelation, that astonished him. She had been deeply stirred by his work—she had loved it; and this was no affectation, it was out of her inmost heart. And she was not really contented at all—she had quite a hunger for life in her!
It had been like an explosion; the barriers had been destroyed between them, and he saw her as she really was. And he could hardly believe it—all through the adventures that followed he would find himself standing in the same kind of daze, whispering to himself—“Corydon! Little Corydon!”
He did not try to do any work that evening. He thought about her, and the problem of her life. She had stirred him strangely; he saw her beautiful with a new kind of beauty. He resolved that he would put her upon the way to some of the joy she sought.
She came early the next morning, and they sat by the lake-shore and talked. They talked about the things she needed to study, and how she should study them; about the books she had read and the books she was to read next. And from this they went on to a hundred questions of literature and philosophy and life. They became eager and excited; their thoughts took wings, and they lost all sense of time and place. There were so many things to be discussed!
Corydon, in spite of all her anti-clericalism, believed in immortality; she laid claim to intuitions and illuminations concerning it. And to Thyrsis, on the other hand, the idea of immortality was the consummation of all unfaith. To him life was a bubble upon the stream of time, a shadow of clouds upon the mountains; there was nothing about it that could be or should be immortal.
“The act of faith,” he cried, “is to give ourselves into the arms of life, to take it as it comes, to rejoice in its infinite unfoldment, the ‘plastic dance of circumstance’; to behold the budding flower and the new-born suns as equal expressions of the joy of becoming. But people are weak, they love themselves, and they set themselves up as the centre of existence!”
But Corydon was personal, and loved life; and she stood out that death was unthinkable—that she had the sense of infinity within her. Thyrsis strove to make her see that one was to wreak one’s hunger for infinity at each moment, and not put it off to any future age; that life was a thing for itself, and needed no sequel to justify it. “It is a free gift, and we have no claim upon it; we must take it on the terms of the giver.”
From that they came to religion. Thyrsis loved the forms of the old faiths, because of the poetry there was in them; and so he wrestled with Corydon’s paganism. He tried to show her how one could read “Paradise Lost” and the English prayer-book, precisely as one read Virgil and Homer; to which Corydon answered that she had been to Sunday-school.
“But you once believed in Santa Claus!” he retorted. “And does that make you quarrel with him now? Every time you read a novel, don’t you pretend to believe in people who never existed?”
He went on to show her how much she lost of the sublime and inspiring things of the past. He took the story of Jesus. It mattered not in the least if it was fiction or fact—it was there, as an achievement of the human spirit. He showed her the man of the gospels—not the stained-glass god with royal robes and shining crown, but the humble workingman, with his dream of a heaven nearby, and a father who loved his children without distinction. He went about among the poor and humble, the world’s first revolutionist; teaching the supremacy of the soul—a doctrine which was to be as dynamite beneath the pillars of all established institutions. He lived as a tramp and an outcast, and he died the death of a criminal; and now those who had murdered him were using his doctrines to enslave the world!—All this was a new idea to Corydon, and she resolved forthwith that she would begin her readings with the New Testament.
Section 6. So it went, until Thyrsis looked up with a start, and saw that the shadows were falling. It was five o’clock, and they had not stopped to eat! Even so, they had no time to cook, but made a cold meal—and talked all the time they were eating.
Then Corydon said, “I must start for home.”
“You won’t want any supper,” said Thyrsis. “Let’s see the sunset first.”
“But mother will be expecting me,” she objected.
“She’ll know you’re all right,” he replied.
So they climbed the hill, and sat and watched the sunset and the rising full moon. The air was clear, and the sky like opal, and the pale, pearly tints of the clouds were ravishing to behold. To Thyrsis it seemed that these colors were an image of the soul that was disclosed to him. He would have been at a loss for words to describe the extraordinary sense of purity that Corydon gave to him; it was not simply her maidenhood—it was something far more rare than that. Here was an utterly perfect human soul; a soul without speck or blemish—without a base idea, with no trace of a vanity, unaware what a pretense might be. The joy and wonder of life welled spontaneously in her, she moved to a noble impulse as a cloud moves before the wind. She was like a creature from the skies they were watching.
And here, in the silver moonlight, a memorable hour came to them. Thyrsis told her of his consecration, and why he lived his hermit-life. He had known for years that he was not as other men; and now every hour it was becoming clearer to him. He shrunk from the word, because it had been desecrated by the world; but it was Genius. More and more frequently there was coming to him this strange ecstasy, the source of which he could not guess; it was like the giving way of flood-gates within him—the pouring in of a tide of wonder and joy. It made him tremble like a leaf, it made him cry aloud and fall down upon the ground exhausted. And yet, whatever the strain might be, he never lost his grip upon himself; rather, all the powers of his mind seemed to be multiplied—it seemed as if all existence became one with his soul.
Never before had he uttered a word of this to anyone. No one could understand the burden it had laid upon him. For this was the thing that all the world was seeking, for the lack of which the world was dying; and it was his to give or to withhold, to lose or to save. He had to forge it and shape it, he had to embody it, to set it forth in images and symbols. And that meant a terrific labor, a feat of mental and emotional endurance quite indescribable. He must hold it, though it burned like fire; he must clutch it to his bosom, though it tore at his heart-strings.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I fail and have to give up; and then I have nothing but a memory without words—or perhaps a few broken phrases that seem mere nonsense. Then I am like a man who has seen some loved one drowned or burned to death before his eyes. It is a thing so ineffable, so precious; and some power seeks to tear it away from me, to bear it into oblivion forever. I can’t know, of course—it might come to some one else—or it might never come again. The feeling I have is like that of a mother for an unborn child; if I do not give it life, no one ever will. And don’t you see—compared with that, what does anything else count? I would lie down and be crushed to pieces, if that would help; truly, I would suffer less than I suffer in what I try to do. And so, the things that other men care for—they simply don’t exist for me. I must have a little money, because I have to have something to eat, and a place to work in. But I don’t want position or fame—I don’t shrink from any ridicule or humiliation. It seems like a mad thing to say, but I have nothing to do either with men’s evil or with their good. I am not bound by any of their duties; I can’t have any country or any home, I can’t have wife or children—I can hardly even have any friends. Don’t you see?”
“Yes,” whispered Corydon, deeply moved, “I see.”
“Look,” he went on—“see all the vice and misery in the world—the cruelty and greed and hate. And see all the stupid and petty things, the narrow motives, the vanities and the jealousies! And all that is because people haven’t this thing that has come to me; they don’t know the possibilities of life, they lack the sense of its preciousness and sacredness. And they seek and seek—and go astray! Take drunkenness, for instance; that brings them joy, but it’s a false scent, it leads them over a precipice. I’ve been down at the bottom of it—you know why I have to go there, and what I’ve seen. And that is where the best of men’s faculties go—yes, it’s literally true! The men who are dull and plodding, they are contented; it’s the men who are adventurous and aspiring who come to that precipice. I walk down an avenue and see the lines of saloons with their gleaming lights, and that thought is like a scream of anguish in my soul; there came a phrase to me once, that I wanted to cry out to people—‘the graveyards of your genius! the graveyards of your genius!’”
Corydon was gazing at his uplifted face. She said, “That is how Jesus must have felt, when he wept over Jerusalem.”
“Yes,” said Thyrsis. “It is a new religion trying to be born. Only nowadays they don’t persecute you, they just ignore you. They don’t hang you up on a cross and make you conspicuous and picturesque—they ridicule you and let you starve. And that is what I face, you see. I’ve saved a hundred dollars—just barely enough to buy me food until I’ve written the book!”
“And other people have so much!” cried Corydon.
“So much—and no idea what to do with it. They just fling it away, in a drunken frenzy. And down below are the poor, who slave to make civilization possible. Such lives as they have to live—I can’t ever get the thought out of my mind, not in any happiest moment! I feel as if I were a man who had escaped from a beleaguered city, and it all depended upon me to carry the tidings and bring relief. I’m their one hope, and if I fail them I’m a traitor, an accursed being! They are ignorant and helpless, and their cry comes to me like some great storm-wind of grief and despair. Oh, some day I mean to utter words that will reach them—I can’t fail! I can’t fail!”
“No!” whispered Corydon. “You must not fail!”
They sat in silence for a while.
“How I wish that I could help you!” she said.
“Who can tell?” he answered. “Perhaps you may. A true friend is a rare thing to find.”
“I would do anything in the world to share in such a work.”
“You really mean that? As hard as it is?”
“I would bear anything,” she said. “I would go to the ends of the earth for it. I would fling away the whole world—just as you have done.”
“Ah, but are you strong enough? Could you stand it?”
“I don’t know that—I’m only a child. But I wouldn’t mind dying.”
And so it came. It came as the dawn comes, unheralded, unheeded—spreading wider, till the day is there. Months afterwards they talked about it, and Thyrsis asked, “When did I propose to you?”
“I don’t think you ever proposed to me,” she answered. “It just came. It had to come—there was no other way.”
“But when did I first kiss you?” he asked.
“I don’t know even that,” she said, and pondered.
“Did I kiss you that night when we sat on the hill?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t have known it if you had,” said Corydon. “It was as natural for you to kiss me as it was for me to draw my breath.”
Section 7. The moon was high when they went down the hill, and he rowed her home. They were silent with the awe that was upon them. They found the people at home in a panic, but they scarcely knew this—and they scarcely troubled to explain.
Then Thyrsis went home, and spent half the night roaming about in excitement. And early in the morning he was sitting on the edge of his canvas-cot, whispering to himself again, “Corydon! Little Corydon!”
He could not think of work that day, but set out to walk to the village by the lonely mountain-road; and half-way there he met the girl, coming in the other direction. There was a light of wonder in her eyes; and also there was perplexity. For all that morning she had been whispering to herself, “Thyrsis! Thyrsis!”
They sat by the roadside to talk it over.
“Corydon,” he began, “I’ve been thinking about what we said last night, and it frightens me horribly. And I want to ask you please not to think about it any more. I could not take anyone else into my life—before God, I couldn’t be so cruel. I have been shuddering at the thought of it. Oh please, please, run away from me—before it is too late!”
“Is that the way it seems?” she asked.
“Corydon!” he cried. “I am a tormented man! There can’t be any happiness in the world for me. And you are so beautiful and so pure and so good—I simply dare not think of it! You must be happy, Corydon!”
“I have never yet been happy,” she said.
“Listen,” he went on—“there is a stanza of Walter Scott’s that came to me this morning—an outlaw song. It seemed to sum up all my feeling about it:
“‘Maiden! a nameless life I lead,A nameless death I’ll die;The fiend whose lantern lights the meadWere better mate than I!’”
Corydon sat staring ahead. “You can’t frighten me away from you,” she said, in a low voice. “It isn’t worth your while to try. But let me tell you what I came to say. I’m so ignorant and so helpless—I didn’t see how I could be of any use to you. And so I wanted to tell you that you must do whatever seemed best to you—just don’t count me at all. You see what I mean—I’m not afraid for myself, but just for you. I couldn’t bear the thought that I might be in your way. I felt I had to come and tell you that, before you went back to your work.”
Now Thyrsis had set out with mighty battlements reared about him; and not all the houris and the courtesans of all the ages could have found a way to breach them. But before those simple sentences of Corydon’s, uttered in her gentle voice, and with her maiden’s gaze of wonder—the battlements crumbled and rocked.
And that was always the way of it. There were endless new explanations and new attitudes, new excursions and discoveries. They would part with a certain understanding, but they never knew with what view they would meet in the morning. They were swung from one extreme to the other, from certitude to doubt, from joy to dismay and despair. And so, day after day they would sit and talk, for uncounted hours. Corydon would come to the little cabin, or Thyrsis would come to the village, and they would wander about the roads or the woods, forgetting their meals, forgetting all the world. Once they wandered away into the mountains, and they sat until the dusk closed round them; they were almost lost that night.
“Of course,” Thyrsis had been saying, “we should not be married like other men and women.”
“No,” said Corydon, “of course not.”
“We should be brother and sister,” he said.
“Yes,” she assented.
“And it would not be real marriage—I mean, it would be just for the world’s eyes.”
“So I don’t see how it could hinder you,” Corydon added. “Whatever I did that was wrong, you would tell me. And then too, about money. I shouldn’t be any burden; for I have twenty-five dollars a month of my own.”
“I had no idea of that,” said Thyrsis.
“I’ve only had it for a year,” said Corydon. “An aunt left me nearly four thousand dollars. I can’t touch the principal until I’m thirty, but I have the income, and that will buy me everything I need. And so it would be just as if you didn’t have me to think of.”
“I don’t think the money side matters so much,” was his reply. “It’s only this summer, you see—until I’ve finished the book.”
Section 8. The key to all the future was the book; but alas, the book was not coming on. How could one write amid such excitement? This was a new kind of wine in Thyrsis’ blood. This was reality! And before it his dream-phantoms seemed to have dissolved into nothingness.
They would make a compact for so many days, and he would start to work; but he would find himself thinking of Corydon, and new problems would arise, and he would take to writing her notes—and finally realize in despair that he might as well go and see her.
Meantime Corydon would be wrestling with tasks of her own. They had talked over her development, and agreed that what she needed was discipline. And because Thyrsis had read her some of Goethe’s lyrics, she had decided to begin with German. Thyrsis had wasted a great deal of time with German courses in college, and so he was able to tell her everything not to do. He got her a little primer of grammar, just enough to make clear the language-structure; and then he set her to acquiring a vocabulary. He had little books full of words that he had prepared for himself, and these she drilled into her brain, all day and nearly all night. She stopped for nothing but to eat—in the woods when the weather was fair and in her room when it rained, she studied words, words, words! And she made amazing progress—while Thyrsis was wrestling with his angels she read Grimm’s fairy tales, and some of Heyse’s “Novellen,” and “Hermann and Dorothea,” and “Wilhelm Tell.”
But these were children’s tasks, and her pilgrimage was one of despair. Above were the heights where Thyrsis dwelt, inaccessible, almost invisible; and how many years must she toil to reach them! She would come to him with tears in her eyes—tears of shame for her ignorance and her stupidity. And then Thyrsis would kiss the tears away, and tell her how many brilliant and clever women he had met, who had the souls of dolls behind all their display of culture.
So Corydon would escape that unhappiness—but alas, only to fall into another kind. For she was a maiden, beautiful and tender, and ineffably precious to Thyrsis; and when they met, their hands would come together—it was as natural for them to embrace as for the flowers to grow. And this would lead to moods of weakness and satisfaction—not to that divine discontent, that rage of impatience which Thyrsis craved. It seemed to him that Corydon grew more and more in love with him, and more willing to cling to him; and he was savage because of his own complaisance. They would spend hours, exchanging endearments and whispering youthful absurdities; and then, the next day, he would write a note of protest, and Corydon would be wild with misery, and would tear up his love-notes, and vow in tears that he should never touch her hand again. Now and then he would try to suggest to her that what she needed for the fulfillment of her life was not a madman like himself, but a husband who would love her and cherish her, as other women were loved and cherished; and there was nothing in all the world that galled her quite so much as this.
Section 9. There came a time when all these happenings could no longer be hid from parents. This unthinkable “engagement” had to be announced, and the furies of grief and rage and despair unchained. No one could realize the change that had come over Corydon—Cory-don, the meek and long-suffering, who now was turned to granite, and immovable as the everlasting hills. As for Thyrsis, all kinds of madness had come from him, and were expected from him. But even he was appalled at the devastation which this thunderbolt caused.
“You have ruined your career! You have ruined your career!” was the cry that rang in his ears all day. And he knew what the world meant by this. Young men of talent who wished to rise in the world did not burden themselves with wives at the age of twenty; they waited until their careers were safe—and meantime, if they felt the need, they satisfied their passions with the daughters of the poor. And it was for some such “eligible man” as this that the world had been preparing Corydon; it was to save her for his coming that her sheltered life had been intended. Her beauty and tenderness would appeal to him, her innocence would bring a new thrill to his jaded passions; and when he offered his hand, there would be no whisper of what his past might have been, there would be no questions asked as to any vices or diseases he might bring with him. There would be trousseaus and flowers and wedding-cake, rice and white ribbons and a honeymoon-journey; and then an apartment in the city, or perhaps even a whole house, with a butler and a carriage—who could tell? With wealth pouring into the metropolis from North and West and South, such things fell often to beautiful and innocent maidens in sheltered homes.
And here was this one, flinging herself away upon a penniless poet who could not support her, and did not even propose to try! “Does he mean to get some work?” was the question; and gently Corydon explained that they intended “to live as brother and sister.” And that capped the climax—that proved stark, raving madness, if it did not prove downright knavery and fraud.
In the end, being utterly baffled and helpless with dismay, the mothers turned upon each other; for to each of them, the virtues of her own offspring being so apparent, it was clear that this hideous tragedy must have come from the machinations of the other. One day Thyrsis and his mother, walking down a road, met Corydon and her mother, upon a high hill where the winds blew wildly; and here they poured out their grief, and hurled their impeachments against the storm. To Thyrsis they assumed heroic proportions, they towered like queens of tragedy; in after-history this was known as the Meeting of the Mothers, and he likened it to the great contest in the Nibelungenlied between Brunhild and Kriemhild.
Then, on top of it all, there came another calamity. In the boarding-house with Corydon lived some elderly ladies, who had a remarkable faculty for divining the evil deeds of other people. They had divined the evil deeds of Corydon and Thyrsis, and one of them was moved to come to Corydon’s mother one day, and warn her lest others should divine them too. And so there was more agony; the discovery was made that Corydon had become a social outcast to all the maids and matrons of the summer population—a girl who went to visit a poet in his lonely cabin, and stayed until unknown hours of the night. And so there came to Thyrsis a note saying that Corydon must come no more to the cabin; and later in the day came Corydon herself, to bring the tidings that a telegram had come from the city, and that she and her mother were to leave the place the next day.
Thyrsis was aflame with anger, and was for going to the nearest parson and having the matter settled there and then. But Corydon dissuaded him from this.
“I’ve been thinking it over,” she said, “and it’s best that I should go. You must finish the book—everything depends upon that, and you know that if I came here now you couldn’t do it. But if I go away, there’ll be nothing to disturb you. I can study meantime; and when we meet in the city in the fall, everything will be clear before us.”
She came and put herself in his arms. “You know, dear heart,” she said, “it won’t be easy for me to go. But I’m sure it’s for the best!”
And Thyrsis saw that she was right, and so they settled it. She spent that day with him—their last day; and floods of tenderness welled up in their hearts, and the tears ran down their cheeks. It was only now that she was going that Thyrsis realized how precious she had become to him, and what a miracle of gentleness and trust she was.
They agreed that here, and not in the village, was the place for their parting. So they poured out their love and devotion, and made their pledges for the future; and towards sundown he kissed her good-bye, and put her in the boat, and stood watching until it was a mere speck down the lake. Then he went back to the house, with a great cavern of loneliness in his soul.
And in spite of all resolves, he was up with the dawn next day, and walking to the village—he must see her once again! He went to the depot with her, and upon the platform they said another farewell; thereby putting a seal upon Corydon’s damnation in the eyes of the maids and matrons of the summer population.
“Ten years!” she said. “How they have faded!”
“And the creases are tight,” said he; “they will be hard to read.”
“Letters! letters!” she exclaimed—“some of them sixty pages long! How much would they make?”
“Perhaps a quarter of a million words,” he said.
“What is to be done about it?”
“They must be selected, and then cut, and then trimmed and pruned.”
“And will that leave any idea of it?”
He answered with a simile. “You wish to convey to a man how it feels to pound stone for twelve hours in the sun. The only way you could really do it would be to take him and let him pound for twelve hours. But he wouldn’t stand for that.”
“So you let him pound for one hour,” said she, with a smile.
“I will put up a sign,” he said—
‘HERE BEGINS THE STONE-POUNDING!’
And then those who are interested will come in and try it; and the rest will peer through the fence and pass on.”
To which she responded, “I would make the sign read,
‘ADMISSION TO LOVERS ONLY!’”
Oh, if I might only stay in a convent until you are ready to take me! Since I left you I find myself possessed of cravings, which, if I indulged them, might bring me the fate of the Maid of Neidpath!
Truly I have known some miserable moments. But I am trying very hard to cultivate a happy, confident activity. The people here are aggressive, and I am afraid I have been rude, which I never like to be. I just succeeded in getting away from a young man who wanted to walk to the village with me. Do you know, it would drive me absolutely mad to talk to anyone now!
My soul has only one cry, and I could sometimes go out on the mountain-side and scream it aloud to the winds. I fear I shall be a trifle wild, in fact utterly in pieces, until you come, with that wonderful recipe of yours for binding me together, and making me complete. I think of you in your house, and wish to God I were there, or out in the desert even, if you were with me.
When I passed through the city I felt exactly as if I were in Hades. The glaring lights and the fearful rattle, the lazy, lounging men—I had dinner in a restaurant, in which all the people seemed to be feeding demons! It has been distinctly shown me why so many people have thought you a rude unmannerly boy! I don’t know what people would think, if I had to be amongst them long.
I have begun so many letters to you in my mind, and oh, the times I have told myself how much I loved you! I have read your letters and slept with them under my pillow, like the veriest love-lorn maiden. But all my happy thoughts are gone at present. It is distracting to me to have to come into such close contact with people.
Oh, tell me, dearest one, what I shall have to do to control myself and preserve the peace of my soul, until I go to you forever? I must not long to see you, it prevents me from studying. If you might only come to me at one moment in the day, and give me one kiss, and then go away! You see, I am conducting myself in a very unwise manner—and it is necessary I should study! I should love to have an indomitable capacity for work, and eat only two meals a day, and never have to think about my body.
I want to tell you what I feel, how utterly and absolutely I am yours, and how any image that comes between you and me enrages me. If only you knew how I give myself up to you in thought, word, and deed!—My one reason for acting now, is that I may show you something I have done, my one thought is to be what you would wish me. No one, no one understands, or ever will, what is in your heart and in mine—to be locked there for ages. There I have placed all my power of love and religion and hope of the life that is to be. To you I give all my trust, all my worship, you are the one link that binds me to myself and to God. Without you I feel now that I should be a poor wanderer.
You give me my feeling of wholeness, of the possibility of completion, that I never had before. In my best and truest moments I know that with you I can be what I have hoped. With you before my eyes I have a grim resolution to conquer or die. The one thing I am sure of always is my love for you. It might be possible for you to stop loving me; but I, now that I have begun, shall continue to love you to the day I die—and after, I hope. I do not love you for what you can give me, I love you because you are you, I must love you now no matter what you are. I believe Shakespeare was right when he said that “love is not love which alters, when it alteration finds.” I do not believe that a person can really love more than once.
I must go to my German again and leave you. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?
II. My dearest Corydon:
I received a letter from you before dinner, and as usual had one of my flights of emotion, and thought of many things to write to you. Now I am up on the mountain-side, trying to recall them. Dearest, you are, as always, more precious to me. I am glad to see that you are suffering some, and I think that it is well that you have to be away from me for awhile, to fight some of your own soul’s battles. You see that I am in my stern humor; as convinced as ever that the soul is to be deepened only by effort, and that the great glory of life cannot be bought or stolen, or even given for love, but must be earned.
I will tell you what I have been doing since you left. I spent three whole days in the most unimaginable wretchedness; I had no hindrances like yours—only the most fearful burden of dullness and sloth, that had crept upon me and mastered me, during all the weeks that I had let myself be so upset and delayed. I cannot picture what I go through when I lose my self-command in that way, but it is like one who is tied down upon a railroad track and hears a train coming. He gets just as desperate as he pleases, and suffers anything you can imagine—but he does not get free. And always the book would be hanging before me, a kind of external conscience, to show me what I ought to have been.
Now I have gotten myself out of that, by an effort that has quite worn me out. When I found myself at work again, I felt a kind of savage joy of effort, a greater power than I ever knew before. In the reckless mood that I had got to, it seemed to me that I could keep so forever.
Now dearest, you must get the same unity in your life; you must concentrate all your faculties upon that—get for yourself that precious habit of being “instant in prayer”, and “strenuous for the bright reward”. As Wordsworth has it, “Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness!” Let it come to you with a pang that hurts you, that for one minute you have been idle, that you have admitted to yourself that life is a thing of no consequence, and that you do not care for it. I shall have to talk to you that way—perhaps not so often as I do to myself, because I do not think you are really in your heart such a very dull and sodden creature as I am.
I think the greatest trial we shall have will be our fondness for each other, and the possibility of being satisfied simply to hold each other in our arms. But we shall get the better of that, as of everything else; and that is not the problem now. You must learn to strive, learn to master yourself; you must prove your power so. Do not care how rude you have to be to those people; look upon the things about you as a kind of dream-world, and know that your own soul’s life is the one real thing for you. And don’t write any more about how circumstances hold you back. When you have got to work you will know that you are given your soul for no purpose but to fight circumstances; that they are the things to make you fight. When they are removed, as I know to my cost, there is still the same necessity of fighting; only it is like a horse who has to win a race without the spurs.
You must talk to yourself about this, night and day, until this desire is so awake in you that you can’t go idle many moments without its rushing into your mind, and giving you a kind of electric shock. And when that happens you fling aside every thing else, every idea but the work that you ought to be doing, and put all your faculties upon that; and every time that you catch them wandering, you do the same thing again, and again. Some times when I become very keenly aware of myself, and of what a shallow creature I really am, it seems to me that it is only by wearing myself out in that grim and savage way that I can make myself even tolerable.
Imuststop. Do you know that for five precious hours by my watch I have sat up here thinking about you and writing to you? Dear me—and I am tired, and frozen, for there is a cold wind. I shall have, I see, to prove some ofmypowers, by not writing letters to you when I should be at the book.
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!
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 onyoursternness. You must realize it.
I cannot tell with the proper conditions and training what energy I might be able to accumulate 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 attitude 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.
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.
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 God, 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.
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 accomplishing 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 passionate, is it for love ofmethat they are? I’m almost afraid at times, when I read your letters—when you tell me of the kind of woman youwantto 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!
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 passion 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 youcouldnot 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 thatmylove 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 notboundyourself 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 absolutetruth; your absolute devotion to what was right and noble 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 attitude 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 attitude; 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 tomyself. And if anything good comes from our love, it will be because of this letter. I challenge what is noblest 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 demandexperience—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 passion, 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 passion 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 passion 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 younow, 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, ifanywoman 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 thatalone—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 God 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 areperfectin 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 Icanlove, that I do know what love is, and that you may trust me. I am not trying to degrade passion—I simply see how passion 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 noble, 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 simplybecauseof the strength and passion 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 youeverythingthat I have. And God 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,allmy 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 wasanywoman 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 bearthatburden? For Corydon, as I look at myself to-night, I am before God, 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,talkingabout 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 God’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 worship 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 Shelley’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 loveme?”
I have been thinking a good deal about this; I do not believe, Corydon, that a man more haunted by the madness of desire ever lived upon earth than I. And when I get at the essence of myself, I do not believe that I am a kind man; I think that a person with less patience for human hearts never existed, perhaps with less feeling. There is only one thing in the world that I can be sure of, or that you can, my fidelity to my ideal! I know that however often I may fail or weaken, however many mistakes I may make, my hunger for the things of the soul willneverleave me, and that night and day I shall work for them. I do not believe I have the right to promise you anything else, I have no right to dream of anything else; this is not my pleasure, as I feel it, it is a frenzy, it is that to which some blind and nameless and merciless impulse drives me. And I may try to persuade myself all my life that I love you, Corydon, and nothing else, and want nothing else; and all the time in the depths of my heart I hear these words from my conscience—“You are a fool.” I love power, I love life, and seek them and strive for them, and care for nothing else and never have; and nothing else can satisfy me. And I cannot give any other love than this, any other promise.
IX. My dear Corydon:
I have been taking a walk this morning, thinking about us, and that I had treated you fearfully. The whole truth of it all is this—that I am so raw and so young and so helpless (and you are as much, if not more so) that I cannot, to save my life, be sure if my love for you is what it ought to be, or even if I could love any one as I ought. And I am so wretchedly dissatisfied! Do you know that for two weeks I have been trying to write a passage of my book—and before God, Icannot!I have not the power, I have not the life!