The Secret Life

Weissman diverts himself and indulges the Teutonic weakness for word-building by naming this double self the "germ-plasm" – that immortal, eternal seed of life that links the generations in an unbroken chain; changing and developing only through the unreckonable processes of time, and taking heed not at all of the mere passing accidents of fleeting avatars.

Why should not this germ-plasm, this eternal ghost, be infinitely sophisticated? What surprises can its mere momentary envelope contrive for a consciousness as old as the moon? If temptations seduce the young flesh, though the old, old soul declares with scorn that teeth are set on edge by the eating of sour grapes, it is not surprised at all when the body persists in its will to seize upon the fruit of its desire, having seen in everyone of a myriad generations the same obstinacy and weakness of the flesh, which learns little and very hardly from the spirit.

Now and again – in his moments of exalted seriousness – man listens to this ancient voice of the spirit breathing the accumulated experience of time, and then it imposes upon him the ripened wisdom of its long retrospect of the generations, and man creates religions – by which he does not square his conduct – or philosophies – whose bit he immediately takes between his teeth. But for the most part he stops his ears to the soul's stern, sad preaching with the thick wax of sentimentalism, and that undying determination that life shall be not what it is, but what he wishes it to be – and so stumbles along, through ever-renewed pangs and tragedies, after a mirage in the hard desert of existence, to whose stones and flints, despite his bruises, he will not turn his eyes. And well it is for us that upon many the mantle of flesh lies so warm and thick that this ghost called consciousness of self cannot chill their blood with his dank wisdom breathed from out a world of graves. In the hearts of such as these all the sweet illusions of existence came to full and natural bloom. To their lusty egoism life has all the exhilaration and freshness of a new and special creation.

Far otherwise is it with the haunted man, whose dwelling is blighted by that cold presence with its terrible memory. Forever echoes through his chambers the cry that hope will be unfulfilled, that love will die, the morning fade, that what has been will be again and forever again; that the waters of life will climb the shore only to crawl back again into the blind deeps of eternity; that the unit is forever lost in the eternal ebb and flux of matter. Endeavour can find no footing in this profundity of experience. To all desire, all aspiration, the ghost says in a paralyzing whisper:

"Scipio, remember that thou art a man– that everything has been done even if thou doest it not – that everything will be done whether thou doest it or no… Where are the poems that were written in Baalbec? Where the pictures that were painted in Tadmor of the Wilderness? Are there fewer pictures and poems to-day because the men who made them are not? Who was prime minister to the bearded King of Babylon? Where is his fame?.. Ay, drink this cup if you will, but you know well the taste of it is not good at the bottom. You have drunk it a thousand thousand of times, and the taste was never good, and yet you will drink it a thousand times again, hoping always that it will be good."…

And the haunted man sits with idle hands and withered purpose, listening always to the voice, while his neighbours push loudly on to die futilely but gloriously in the unending battle.

"An end-of-the-century disease," say these full-fed, happy egotists with lowered breath and eyes askance as they pass the haunted house. "The mould of age has fallen upon him and made him mad." Yet before the walls of Troy these two – the ghost-ridden, and the happy egotist – battled for the glowing shadow of a woman whom neither man loved nor desired. Achilles, blackly melancholy in his tent, heard the old voice cry

"ἐν δὲ ἰῇ τιμῇ ἠμὲν κακὸς ἠδὲ καὶ ἐσθλός"

and disdains the greatness of life and the littleness of it. To an iron inevitableness of fate he opposes only indifference and an unbending courage. That which has been will be, and the end is death and darkness. He has no illusions. He wars neither for love of country nor love of Helen. If Troy falls nothing is gained. If the Greeks fail nothing will be lost. In time all the sweat and blood shed upon Ilium's windy plain will evaporate into a mere mist of uncredited legend. In Achilles, the other self, the alter ego, is the stronger man. The ghost of dead experience is as living as he.

Not so is it with Hector. All the passions of humanity are as new and fresh to him as if none before himself had known them. He looks neither forward nor back. The present is his concern. What though men have died and been forgotten, he will not lessen his utmost effort, even to the giving up of his life to save Troy. That is to him the one thing of importance. So robust is his courage, his faith, his love, that the sad spirit of memory within him cannot speak loud enough to make him hear. There is no warring of dual personalities in him; he is aware of but one – that rich momentary incarnation called Hector, more potent than the memories and experiences of the thousands of lives that preceded him, that gave him existence.

What though Achilles was right; what though both be but dust and legend now – who would not choose that flash of being called Hector – Hector dragged at the chariot-heel of Achilles – Hector with wife enslaved and children slaughtered and his city's proud towers levelled with the plain, rather than to have been the haunted victor, triumphing but not triumphant; fighting without purpose or hope? The same end indeed came to both, but one died as he lived, for what he thought a glorious end, while the other too passed away – but with the cold knowledge that both deaths were fruitless and vain.

Troy is a dream, but the battle forever is waged between the fresh incarnation of being and the memories of past being. Every creature wakes out of childhood aware that he lives not alone in even the secretest chambers of his life. Which is the I he cannot always say. The two companions are never at one. Sometimes the struggle breaks into open flame. Sometimes the one is victor, sometimes the vanquished. Each fights for Helen, for his ideal of pleasure, of wisdom, or of good, but in the very handgrips of battle a chilling doubt will fall between them whether she for whom they war – call her virtue, beauty, lust, life, what you will – is the real Queen, or only some misleading eidolon whose true self is hid in distant Sparta; and so the grasp relaxes, the tense breath falls free, the selves mingle. Man gropes for truth and finds it vague, intangible, not to be grasped – a dream.

February 17.

"A Young Man's Fancy."

What is that ineffable quality in the air that says Spring?

Long ago, as far back as towards the end of January, there came suddenly one day a sense that the winter was conquered. There has been much cold weather since – we shall have much cold still, but there is always a promise in the air.

There is a sad day later in the year when one is aware all at once that summer is ending, and the warm, mild weeks that follow never console for that hour's realization that the apex is crossed and the rest of the path slopes downward. Just such a day comes in one's life, – while one is still young and strong – a sudden sense that youth is done; the climacteric of passion passed. Life has a long Indian summer still, but it's never again the real thing, – that ripening toward fruition; that ecstasy of expansion and growth. There is no visible change for a while, yet every day there is an imperceptible fall in the temperature. Always the nights are growing longer. The flowers drop away one by one – the sap sinks a little, leaving the extreme delicate twigs moribund. No one has seen the leaves fall, yet there are fewer upon the bough – winter is coming.

Age is peaceful, perhaps – but middle age – ! The wave clings to the shore, but the inexorable ebb draws it down relentlessly into the deep. This is the time that men go musth, like old elephants. This is the period when both men and women do their mad deeds, which belie all their previous records. It is their one last frantic clutch after vanishing romance and passion. Men buy a semblance of it from young women sometimes, and resolutely endeavour to persuade themselves that it is the real thing – that gold can renew youth, can purchase a second summer – but they know well that it is only a mechanical imitation. Those cruel old satirists, the comedy writers, loved to paint the trembling dotard resolutely shutting his eyes to the lusty young rival hiding behind the jade's petticoats.

As for the women! – who shall tell the real story of the middle age of women? – of the confident coquette, who one day turns away to punish her slave, and finds, when she relents, that his eyes are fixed upon her daughter? – of the bewildered inspection of the mirror, that still tells a fluttering tale of curves and colours, though startled experience shows the eyes of men turning in preference to crude, red-elbowed girls, obviously her inferior in grace and charm? – of the shock of finding that the world is no longer much interested in her – the amazement of the discovery that the handsome lads see little difference between a woman of thirty-five and one of fifty? – of the shame-faced misery of learning that the passion, which she has virtuously resolved to repulse, is given in reality to her niece? Her charm, her sweetness, her well-preserved beauty is as nothing beside mere raw youth. Undeveloped figures, flat chests, blotchy complexions, are of more value than her rounded mellow loveliness. She is pushed from her throne by giggling girls, who stare at her in hard contempt and wonder openly what the old creature does lingering belated in this galley.

Though she be called "a fine woman" still, men of all ages will turn from her to dote upon an empty-headed debutante. Her comprehension and sympathy, her wit and her learning are less enthralling than the vapid babblings of red-cheeked misses just out of pinafores. Her heart is as young as ever; she knows herself capable of a finer, nobler passion and tenderness than the girl can dream of, yet the selfish, egotistic emotions of the self-confident chit awake a rapture that would be dulled by the richest warmth she could give.

"Age, I do abhor thee:
Youth, I do adore thee;
O, my love, my love is young!"

That she in her turn elbowed the preceding generation from its place comforts her not at all. Oh, for again one hour only of the splendid domination of youth – one rich instant of the power to intoxicate!..

There is nothing for it but to keep such things to one's self, and jog on quietly and respectably to the end. One has had one's turn.

That mad girl Spring has passed up this way
With a hole in her pockets,
For here lies her money all strewn in the grass —
Broad dandelion ducats.

She'll be needing this wealth ere the end of the year
For a warm winter gown,
Though now she's content with a breast-knot of buds
And a violet crown.

She heard in the green blooming depths of the wood
The voice of a dove,
And she dropped all these flowering coins as she ran
To meet summer and love.

'Twill not serve you to gather from out her wild path
All your two hands can hold —
Only youth and the Spring may buy kisses and mirth
With this frail fairy gold.

February 18.

An Arabian Looking-glass

There has been great recrudescence of the Essay of late – none of it very important, I take the liberty of thinking. We moderns have lost the trick of it. All of us, at least, but Stevenson, and he hardly seems a modern, so closely is he related to the great classics, with his inheritance of the Grand Style, like the bel canto, now a lost art. And yet the Essay is a great temptation. Doubtless not one of all those who go down into the ink-bottle with pens has quite escaped its seduction. Generally it is, I suspect, merely an outcropping of the somewhat too widely known need of the artistic nature for "self-expression" in more definite terms than ordinary work permits.

The young fellows, still walking in the light of the eternal pulchritudes, are touchingly anxious lest they "falsify themselves" – pathetically unaware of the supreme unconcern of the rest of humanity as to their personal veracity. The line between art and the other thing is drawn just across this zone of egotism. "The other thing" is a man's expression of himself; Art is the mirror in which each observer sees only his own face. The Arabian legend of the prosperous old beggar who, making a pilgrimage to Mecca, left to his son, as his sole means of support, a looking-glass, and returned to find the boy starving and gazing into the mirror himself, is supposed to cynically suggest the uses of judicious flattery, but has deeper application. Speak of yourself – the world yawns. Talk to it of itself – rudely, vaguely, profoundly, how you will – and it hangs upon your lips. Turn the mirror toward it and it says proudly, "Of just such exalted devotion and sacrifice am I capable," or mutters with a shudder, "There, but for the grace of God, goes Augustine."

The tenor sings "Sous ta Fenetre" and every face is lighted by the inner shining of romance. The strangest revelations are discerned upon the countenances of respectable matrons, of rangé men of affairs. They beat their hands together in a flooding wave of applause, and the greasy Italian in his uneasy evening dress swells with a strutting consciousness of his vocal chords, of his method, his upper C, of his own value.

O tempora! O mores! He is nothing whatever to them. It is only that in every human heart there is a chord that vibrates to C in alt. They are quite unaware of him, and of his greasy personality. Every man is singing with his own soul's voice under the lattice of his first beloved. Every woman is leaning to listen to a dream lover yearning up to her through the warm scented moonlight. As for the garlicky loves of the singer they care not one jot whether he loves or not. It is all a question of themselves, of a vibration.

March 4.

The Cry of the Women

I have been clearing out a lot of old books, preparatory to moving, and have been amused to see how empty and dead many already are, which a few years since were raging through edition after edition, and were the subject of so much talk and interest. Already more than half have grown as desiccated and unimportant as last year's leaves, and their "timeliness" seems of a time as far past as the deluge. There was among these dead books a group on the Woman Question, which already, in so short a space, has lost all its interrogation point. Is it that there was really no Woman Question, or has the Question already received an answer?

Usually one is inclined to think that when a book voices with truth and passion the needs and thoughts of even a portion of humanity, it has a real claim to be classed as literature, though it fails of the immortality which is the meed only of such writings as express with beautiful verity the immortal, unchanging needs of life. But already one regards with amused indifference yesterday's crop of novels written by women, with their vague ecstasies of longing, their confused cries of discontent, their indistinct moans and reproaches, though such a very short time since those books faithfully expressed the mental state of the sex, as one could not doubt, seeing the greediness with which editions were called for of "The Heavenly Twins," "Keynotes," "A Superfluous Woman," and their like, or listening to the echoes awaked by their inchoate sentiments in the feminine mind. Yet the sum of the protest of all these books by women was like the cry of an infant – suffering but inarticulate.

I suppose the truth is that even so short a time since free thought and free speech were still so new to women that, struggling in the swaddling bands of ignorance and convention, it was small wonder that she could not state with precision, or even define clearly to herself, where her pain lay, nor how she would allay it. She knew she was in revolt against what had been. She could not yet choose what she would change in the future. Some of them cried out for larger political rights, others were convinced that the abolition of stays and the introduction of trousers was all that was needed to produce a feminine millennium.

"Latch-keys!" cried the browbeaten English girls – "and freedom to be out after dark like our own brothers. Look at the men. They are quite happy. It must be the possession of latch-keys that makes them so: give them also to us."

"No," roundly declared a certain Mona Caird, "what we really need is a latch-key to let us out of the lifelong oppressive bond of marriage. It weighs too heavily upon us – let us go free!"

"Nonsense!" contradicted Sarah Grand. "Marriage is all right. What is wrong is man. He comes to the marriage altar with stained and empty hands, while he demands that ours be spotless, and heaped with youth, health, innocence, and faith. He swindles us. Reform man if you would make us happy!"

"Higher education" – "Equal wages" – "Physical development" – "No household drudgery" – "Expansion of the ego," cried the conflicting voices; each with a quack panacea for the disease of discontent.

Can it be that all this was but ten years ago? How quickly ideas are changing!