Search-Light Letters

To A Young Man or Woman in Search of the Ideal. IV

That beatific mental condition associated by my midnight visitor, the reporter, with people of alleged cultivation and æsthetic tastes, when in the presence of the beauties or marvels of nature, like sunset, mountain scenery, ocean calm and ocean storm, is doubtless a familiar experience to you. The wonder book of nature is constantly being held up by poet and painter as the source of human ideality, and all the traditions of civilization urge you to attain that degree of artistic development under the white light of which the seals of that book become loosened, and you are able to read in the evening star and the mountain torrent lessons of inspiration and truth. Next to nature in their æsthetic potency are her hand-maids, music, sculpture, letters and painting – briefly, the civilized arts, the medium by which mortals seek to woo and hold fast to beauty. We listen to the gorgeous anthems of the world's most famous composers, and our souls thrill and vibrate with emotion; life seems grand and everything possible. We stand before the greatest marbles and canvasses, and we seem to have truth within our grasp and nature almost subjugated. How exquisitely falls on the senses the sublimity of the lines

Fair as a star, when only oneIs shining in the sky.

We catch a glimpse there of what we call heaven. Is there any more satisfactory occupation for a thirsty soul than to scan the fairness of the twilight heavens when the evening star shines alone and the saffron or purple glories of the departing day irradiate the west?

Noi andavam per lo vespero attentiOltre, quanto potean gli occhi allungarsi,Contro i raggi serotini e lucenti.

So wrote Dante in immortal verse, to portray the æsthetic value of a kindred experience.

I selected those lines of Wordsworth because he, of all the poets, suggests more ostensibly in his verse deliberate pursuit of the ideal. Shelley, indeed, reveals a bolder purpose to unmask the infinite, but his mood is oftener that of an audacious stormer of heaven than of a reverent seeker for perfect truth. We feel in Wordsworth a conscious intent to distill from the study of nature and of man a spiritual exhalation, which would enlighten him and enable him, by force of his poetic gifts, to enlighten us as to how best to live. When we think of him, we see him amid the exquisite scenery of his favorite lakes, walking in close communion with God; discerning the manifestations of the infinite in the mountain and the wild flower, in the splendor of the storm and the faithful doings of the humblest lives.

Ever since he wrote Wordsworth has been the patron saint of introspective souls. In his poetry they have found not merely suggestion but a creed. The poet himself was at heart an enthusiast and a revolutionary, and his worship of quiet beauty and subjective refinement was the expression of a design broader and deeper in its scope than many of his followers have been willing to adopt. He revealed not merely the æsthetic significance of the contemplative life which substitutes soul analysis, with God in nature as a guide, for the grosser interests of the flesh, but also the unholiness of class distinctions and of the indifference of man to his fellow-man as distinguished from himself. The followers of Wordsworth were, for the most part, prompt to accept the first without including the second and equally fundamental tenet of his philosophy. What, a quarter of a century ago, was the ordinary practice of the cultivated and refined, who had been stirred either directly or indirectly by the teaching of the great poet to adopt contemplation as the key-note of their daily lives? Their greatest number was in beautiful, rural England; but the spiritual atmosphere breathed by them soon found its way across the Atlantic, and served to exalt and modify the ever moral inclinations of New England.

Picture, if you will, the model country house of the English country gentleman of comfortable means and refined tastes. To begin with, the structure itself is charming; time has bestowed upon it picturesqueness, and art has made it beautiful with the simple but effective arrangement of vines and flowers. There is nothing of the vileness of earth at hand to mar or offend. The proprietor himself, an elder son, has been left with a competence; no riches, but sufficient to enable him to pursue his literary or other refined interests without molestation from pecuniary cares. The interior is tasteful and æsthetically satisfying; the spacious, comfortable rooms contain all that is desirable in the way of upholstery, ornaments, books, and pictures. The large drawing-room windows command a fair expanse of velvet lawn, flanked by stately trees. Beyond lies an undulating acreage of ancestral metes and bounds, rich in verdure and precious with associations. Here lives our gentleman the greater portion of the year; lives aspiringly according to his Wordsworthian creed. He eschews or uses with admirable moderation the coarser pleasures and vanities of life. Unselfishness, gentleness, and nicety of thought and speech are the custom of his household. He himself finds congenial occupation in literary or scientific research, in the hope of adding some book or monograph to the world's store of art or knowledge. His wife, in co-operation with the church, plays a gracious part among their tenants or among the village sick and poor, teaching her daughters to dispense charity in the form of soup, coals, jellies, and blankets. Parents and children alike, jealously intending to attain holiness and culture, continuously take an account of their individual spiritual successes and failures, and though they hold these auditings with God in the church, they renew them often under the inspiring influence of nature.

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

or, as Dante expressed a similar conception,

'Twas now the hour that turneth back desireIn those who sail the sea, and melts the heartThe day they've said to their sweet friends farewell,And the new pilgrim penetrates with love,If he doth hear from far away a bellThat seemeth to deplore the dying day.

This is the hour when the Wordsworthian spirit, refined, conscientious, aspiring, beauty and duty loving, sees through the splendor of the lucent, saffron sky, heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending. Not always is the vision so adorable. Often enough the gazer knows the bitterness of divine discontent, and finds the golden glory but a bar, shutting out God. In the favorable hour, though, comes the rapture, and the transfiguration; the exquisite, refined feelings seem to find communion with the infinite, and a voice from heaven to say:

Well done, good and faithful servant.

I have selected this experience of the cultivated English household rather than that of the purely religious life as an example, for the reason that in it the æsthetic side is represented in the soul-hunger, and that the existing conditions of earth are, to a certain extent, taken into account. In the purely religious life, the emotions of the exalted soul have, in the past at least, been prone to exclude the actual conditions of human life from consideration. The thought has been that the earthly existence is travail, and at best a discipline; that the joys of life are vanity, and the mundane problems of life unworthy of the interested attention of the heaven-seeking soul. Modern religious theories have modified this point of view, but certainly in some sects still the æsthetic value of existence is almost contemptuously discarded by religion. I have taken the beautiful lives of the Wordsworthians as an example, also because the religious element is so manifestly cherished and cultivated in them. It is intended in them that art and God should work together, or, more accurately, the precept is that the æsthetic side of humanity is one of the noblest manifestations of the infinite within us. It is significant in this connection that though art has often reached its apogee in periods of moral decay, the ruin of the nation, thus robbed of spiritual vitality, has soon followed, in spite of the glory of its sculpture and canvasses. But that is a mere interjection. The point I wish to suggest is this: The sane soul recognizes, when face to face with truth, that what we see in the glory of the sunset, when we think we walk with God, must be, in order to be of value, an inspiration based on the conditions of mundane life. Without this, prayer and adoration become a mere nervous exhalation, reaching out for something which has no more substance than an ignus fatuus. The old saints who lived and died in prayer, ignoring human relations, seem to us to-day to have been wofully deluded. They yearned to be translated from a world to which they had contributed nothing but the desire to be holy. This desire is of the essence of the matter; and so we consent to give their reverences the benison of our distinguished consideration. But aspiring souls, as evidenced by the æsthetic man and woman of culture, presently perceived the error. They recognized that aspiration, to be vital, must start with a conception of the world as it was, and seek a realization of the world as it might be, and that in this seeking lay service to God and preparation for heaven. Proceeding they fixed on unselfish human love and on beauty as the motive of their creed, and endeavored to live lives animated by these principles. This creed has been the real creed of aspiring humanity during the past century and a half, and it still seems sufficient to many. There have been diverse differences of application and administration in connection with it, according as the pendulum swung more or less near to one or the other of the two cardinal points of faith, unselfish love, or exquisite beauty. There have been some who, in their desire to make the relations of man toward those with whom he lived and whom he loved more ideal, have been disposed to ignore the claims of color and elegance; and there have been others so eager in their allegiance to the cause of beauty that they have exalted sense and emotion at the expense of unselfishness and purity. Essentially, however, the ideal life of the modern centuries has sought to develop the individual soul by stimulating its faculties to cherish self-sacrificing devotion to familiar friends, æsthetic appreciation of form, color and sound, and exquisite personal refinement. The Christian life, in its highest form, from this amalgamation of human traits, has constructed an ideal for the soul founded on something tangible and substantial in human consciousness. When the Christian said, "O God, make me pure and noble," it has been no longer necessary to rhapsodize on a heaven concerning which he knew nothing, and to disclaim all interest in this earth. On the contrary, he has appreciated that conceptions of the ideal must be based on human conditions or they cease to be intelligible, and that the soul which seeks God can reach him only through faithfulness to a method of life, the aim of which is to make the best use of earth and its possibilities.

Beautiful as have been the lives which have resulted from this æsthetic spirituality, the world has been beginning to realize, during the last twenty-five years, that this is a creed partially outworn, or, rather, a creed hampered by its limitations. In taking its suggestion for the ideal from the world, noble society chose to accept economic conditions as they were, and to fashion an ideal which necessarily shut out the larger portion of humanity from the possibility of attaining it. The æsthetic satisfaction which we draw from the sunset is due to the pleasure which conscience feels in its allegiance to an ideal of its own devising, and seeing God is only another term for the solemn identification of man's aspirations. The Wordsworthian soul, as interpreted by his followers, assumed that the political conditions of society were always to remain the same, or, more accurately speaking, it accepted those conditions as permanent and continuously inevitable. In other words, it did not foresee democracy. In short, its ideal was essentially aristocratic and exclusive, and it continues so stubbornly in the present day in many circles. To be sure, it has included and continues to include in its formula the carrying of soups, jellies, coals, and blankets to the poor, and the proffering of educational advantages to the ignorant, but it never has predicated, as essential to the world's true progress, such fundamental changes in the social status of society as would involve the annihilation of class distinctions and a greater general happiness for the mass of humanity. To be sure, there have always been individual philanthropists, who insisted upon these changes as vital, but they have been ignored by the leaders of ideal thought as visionary enthusiasts, or maligned as disturbers of permanent society. It has been the struggle of democracy itself that has been the chief revealer of a new vision in the sunset, until now, at last, the soul in search of the ideal appreciates that it does not walk with God unless it sees in the saffron glory its own sympathy with these new conditions.

The development of this recognition has been tolerably swift in certain directions. New hospitals, new colleges, college settlements among the poor, are concrete evidences of the modern spirit, and equally significant, if less heralded, are the faithful, zealous labors of physicians, teachers, clergymen, and the host of workers in various lines of industry, where the earnest, self-sacrificing work done is rarely if ever paid for, in dollars and cents, commensurate with its value. The serious energy of the best humanity, instead of pluming itself in the seductive contemplation of æsthetic beauty, seems rather to be celebrating the apotheosis of dirt. It feels that the cleansing of the physical and moral filth from our slums, the relief of appalling ignorance and superstition, the combating of political dishonesty and the checking of private greed are more to be desired at this time than great marbles and a great literature. Or, rather, perhaps, it seems probable that great marbles and a great literature will not come to us until the leaven of this new ideal expresses itself in the truths of art. The sane, aspiring soul can no longer be satisfied unless it recognizes the inevitableness and the pathos of democracy and adjusts its human perspective accordingly.

The world of vested rights and wealth is still reluctant to accept this new æstheticism, and the soul in search of the ideal will find the allurements of aristocratic culture still insisted on as the secret of noble living. Social arrogance and the exclusive tendencies of class are slow in yielding to the hostility even of republican forms of government. In this country parents who profess to be Americans still choose to send their children to private instead of to the public schools, in order to separate them from the mass of the people. The doctrine of social caste, thus early impressed upon the youth of both sexes, serves to produce a class of citizens who are not really in sympathy with popular government. If one questions sometimes the depth of purpose of highly evolved man, and doubts the existence of God, it is because of the lavish wantonness of living of some of the very rich in the presence of the thousands of miserable and wretched creatures who still degrade our large cities. But there is this to be said in this connection: This new æsthetic ideal is at least partially the fruit of the awakening of humanity to a keener appreciation of the conditions of human life; but its progress is made certain by the coming evolution of democracy, which slowly but surely will overwhelm the aristocratic spirit forever, even though æstheticism, as realized by the arrogant and exclusive, perish in the process. The ideal life to-day is that which maintains the noblest aims of the aspiring past, cherishing unselfishness, purity, courage, truth, joy, existence, fineness of sentiment and æsthetic beauty; but cherishes these in the spirit and for the purposes of a broader humanity than the melting soul has hitherto discerned in the sunset, the ocean, or the starry heavens. There are among us men and women living in this spirit of idealism, and they, O, my correspondents! are the first-class passengers.

To A Modern Woman with Social Ambitions. I

In the first place let me assure you that I am in sympathy with you. I am not one of those unreasonable philosophers who would have every wife merge her identity in that of her husband, and every spinster who has decided not to marry relegated to obscure lodgings with a parrot and a dog. My sentiments recognize the justice and the value of the emancipation movement by means of which woman has obtained freedom to arrange her life conformably to her own ideas as to what is salutary and entertaining for her as an individual, whether she be married or single, beautiful or plain. In homely phrase the world has become woman's oyster, and, save for the little matter of the ballot, a restriction concerning which the subject-matter of this letter does not require me to agitate you, every woman is at liberty to open her oyster according to her own sweet will. Filial limitations and the other circumstances of her environment must prohibit this and make desirable that manner of living, just as in the case of man; but to all intents and purposes, if she be clear-headed and ambitious, she is free to do what she chooses in the way she chooses, whether it be to preside over a drawing-room exquisitely, to guide a woman's club to grace and glory, to renounce the world for the sake of art and a studio, or, it may be, to combine all these occupations in one seething round of tense existence which, according to the constitution of the subject, is liable to terminate abruptly in nervous prostration or, baffling the predictions of the doctors, to continue indefinitely unto hale and bright-eyed longevity. In brief, I make my best bow to the modern woman; I admire her and am stimulated by her. Indeed, I take her so seriously in her endeavor to be independent that I am almost ready to let her stand up in an electric-car or other overcrowded conveyance. I have on occasions even made so free as to bend forward in the theatre and, lacking an introduction, ask her to take off the high hat which obscured my view of the stage. Verily, these are piping times of progress for woman, as every one knows, and I am glad to put on record as a philosopher that I approve of and am edified by them.

So much, my dear correspondents, to assure you of my sympathy and my distinguished consideration. There are five of you, but three out of the five – a maid almost hoping always to remain one, a wife almost sorry that she is one, and a widow almost certain that she never will be anything else – have written to me as the result of what is known colloquially as the dumps. That is to say, you have become socially ambitious from stress of circumstances, because your dolls are stuffed with sawdust. But for the letters of Numbers 4 and 5 I should be tempted to adopt the manner of a French philosopher and dismiss you with this piece of counsel: Love some one else. Numbers 4 and 5, respectively, a wife thoroughly happy in the wedded state, and a radiant, able-bodied spinster haughtily unconcerned about love and lovers, are not to be answered by such a simple gallicism. The frame of mind of these two last-mentioned ladies was evidently not induced by disappointment; they are not seeking social activity as an antidote to care or as a mere occupation to consume time. Their letters clearly indicate to me a consciousness of stored-up capabilities and an ambition to display them. Devoted as Number 4 obviously is to her husband, it is no less clear that she is not content to be regarded merely as his wife. Similarly, Number 5, though serene at the prospect of living without a mate, still cherishes the intention of preserving her identity. In other words, each is imbued with the desire to make her individuality felt in the world. It is in the interest of this justifiable and laudable ambition that I take my pen in hand to compose an answer. The constituency to which Numbers 4 and 5 belong is large and constantly increasing. There are thousands of women without a grievance against Cupid whose bosoms are aching with the desire for identity, and it is to them, as represented by you, that I address myself.

Your photographs, furnished as evidence of good faith in accordance with my requirements, lie before me as I write. Yours, Number 4 (the wife thoroughly happy in the wedded state), is suggestively typical of American womanhood. I have merely to utilize my mind's eye in order to behold you in the living flesh, tall, graceful, spare, and willowy; earnest and piquant in expression, with an air which suggests both the desire and the determination to accomplish great things, including no less a range than the probing of the secrets of the infinite, and the supplying of an ideal domestic dinner. Though willowy still, you have a plumper person than before you were married, and your face has lost the Amazonian tense look which it sometimes wore when you were a maid. Your eyes are bright with happiness, and a shrewd humor plays about the corners of your mouth; humor indicating, perhaps, that you find the world less sorry and more alluring than you did in the days when, grandly aspiring, but a little ignorant, cynical, and severe, you were waiting for an ideal lover to come and lift you from this humdrum, vulgar sphere to the stars. In other words, you have a drawing-room, such as it is, and a baby such as never was, and a husband whose faults (all of which you know) are more than balanced by his virtues, so that you are able to love him devotedly with your eyes open, and thus preserve your self-respect as an intelligent modern, and yet satisfy that primal need of your nature, the capacity for adoring affection. I see you thus in the living flesh, and I see you presently lost in engaging thought. You are saying to yourself some such words as these: "Everything is running smoothly. Alexander's (husband's name) affairs are on a satisfactory financial basis; baby is well, and has cut all her first teeth; the servants seem to be satisfied with us; and now is my chance to do something. What shall it be?"

[Note.– "Give an afternoon tea," ejaculated Josephine, to whom I was reading what I had written.]

I have no doubt that my wife is right. That is the first thing you would be likely to do. It is the never-failing resource of the young bride and the aged matron alike when pricked by the spur of social activity. Out go the cards of invitation, thin bread and butter is cut, and presently, on the appointed day, a file or a throng, according to weather and circumstances, of petticoats goes into and from the house, and when the last skirt has disappeared you breathe a sigh of relief and self-congratulation. "Thank heaven, that is over, and I can start afresh with a clear conscience and an erect head." Marvellous are the ways of the modern woman. It is thus that she settles with her social creditors and wins a tranquil soul. What costs less subtle man canvas-back ducks and cases of wine is accomplished by the aid of a few tea-leaves and slices of thin bread and butter. And then her slate is clear, and she can afford to sink back for a decade into social greediness or inactivity, as the case may be, proud and self-satisfied as a peacock.

Her slate, not yours, Number 4. Mrs. Alexander Sherman let me call you by way of convenience, for a mere number suggests convict life. As Josephine has intimated, you would probably begin with the tea, but the last visitor would leave you only temporarily exhilarated. Within a week carking, though praiseworthy, care would return, and you would be asking yourself, "What shall it be next?"

I hear some bluff and old-fashioned man exclaim, "Let her look after her husband and children, and attend to her domestic duties." Do not be concerned by this superficial jibe, dear madam. I am here to defend you, and I would be the last person in the world to aid and abet your aspirations if I were not confident that you are a thoroughly devoted wife and mother. Let me silence this stuffy censor at once by informing him that in the interest of your baby you have familiarized yourself with the laws of hygiene and the latest theories of education, and that in no establishment among your contemporaries of equal means is a better or more punctual dinner served. If I did not believe this to be the case, I would have nothing more to do with you, philosophically speaking.