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Literary Love Letters and Other Stories

R >> Robert Herrick >> Literary Love Letters and Other Stories




_He._ I know. One night in the Sierras we camped high up above the summits
of the range. The altitude, perhaps, or the long ride through the forest,
kept me awake. Our fires died down; a chalky mist rose from the valleys,
and, filtering through the ravines, at last capped the granite heads. The
smouldering tree-trunks we had lit for fires and the little patch of rock
where we lay, made an island in that white sea. Between us and the black
spaces among the stars there was nothing. How eternally quiet it was! I
can feel that isolation now coming over my soul like the stealthy fog,
until I lay there, unconscious of my body, in a wondering placidity,
watching the stars burn and fade. I could seem to feel them whirl in their
way through the heavens. And then a thought detached itself from me, the
conception of an eternity passed in placidity like that without the pains
of sense, the obligations of action; I loved it then--that cold residence
of thought!

_She._ You have known it, too. Those moments when the body in life feels
the state of spirit come rarely and awe one. Dear heart, perhaps if our
spirits were purified and experienced we should welcome that perpetual
contemplation. We cannot be Janus-faced, but the truth may lie with the
monks, who killed this life in order to obtain a grander one.



TWO SOULS IN HEAVEN REMEMBER THE LIFE LIVED ON EARTH.

_He._ Can you conceive of any heaven for which you would change this
shameful world? Any heaven, I mean, of spirits, not merely an Italian
palace of delights?

_She._ There is the heaven of the Pagans, the heaven of glorified earth,
but----

_He._ Would you like to dine without tasting the fruit and the wine? What
attainment would it be to walk in fields of asphodel, when all the colors
of all the empyrean were equally dazzling, and perceived by the mind
alone? For my part, I should prefer to hold one human violet.

_She_. The heaven of the Christian to-day?

_He_. That may be interpreted in two ways: the heaven where we know
nothing but God, and the heaven where we remember our former life. Let us
pass the first, for the second is the heaven passionately desired by those
who have suffered here, who have lost their friends.

Suppose that we two had finished with the episode of death, and had come
out beyond into that tranquillity of spirit where sorrows change to
harmony. You and I would go together, or, perhaps, less fortunate, one
should wait the other, but finally both would experience this
transformation from body into spirit. Should you like it? Would it fill
your heart with content--if you remembered the past? I think not. Suppose
we should walk out some fresh morning, as we love to do now, and look at
that earth we had been compelled to abandon. Where would be that fierce
joy of inrushing life? for, I fancy, we should ever have a level of
contentment and repose. Indeed, there would be no evening with its
comforting calm, no especially still nights, no mornings: nothing is
precious when nothing changes, and where all can be had for eternity.

We should talk, as of old, but the conversation of old men and women would
be dramatic and passionate to ours. For everything must needs be known,
and there could be no distinctions in feeling. Should you see your sister
dying in agony at sea, you would smile tranquilly at her temporary and
childish sorrow. All the affairs of this life would not strike you, pierce
your heart, or move your pulse. They would repeat themselves in your eyes
with a monotonous precision, and they would be done almost before the
actors had begun. Indeed, if you should not be incapable of blasphemy, you
would rebel at this blind game, played out with such fever.

We must not forget that our creative force would be spent: planning,
building, executing, toiling patiently for some end that is mirrored only
in our minds--how much of our joy comes from these!--would be laid aside.
We should have shaken the world as much as we could: now, _peace_....
Again, I say, peace is felt only after a storm. Like Ulysses, we should
look wistfully out from the isolation of heaven to the resounding waves of
this unconquered world.

Of course, one may say that the mind might fashion cures for all this;
that a greater architect would build a saner heaven. But, remember, that
we must not change the personal sense; in heaven, however you plan it, no
mortal must lose that "I" so painfully built from the human ages. If you
destroy his sense of the past life, his treasures acquired in this earth,
you break the rules of the game: you begin again and we have nothing to do
with it.

_She._ You have not yet touched upon the cruellest condition of the life
of the spirit.

_He._ Ah, dearest, I know that. You mean the love of the person. Indeed,
so quick it hurts me that I doubt if you would be walking that morning in
heaven with me alone. Perhaps, however, the memories of our common life on
earth would make you single me out. Let us think so. We should walk on to
some secluded spot, apart from the other spirits, and with our eyes cast
down so that we might not see that earth we were remembering. You would
look up at last with a touch of that defiance I love so now, as if a young
goddess were tossing away divine cares to shine out again in smiles. Ah,
how sad!

I should have some stir about the heart, some desire to kiss you, to
embrace you, to possess you, as the inalienable joy of my life. My hand
could not even touch you! Would our eyes look love? Could we have any
individual longing for one-another, any affection kept apart to ourselves,
not swallowed up in that general loving-kindness and universal
beatification proper to spirits?

I know upon earth to-day some women, great souls, too, who are incapable
of an individual love. They may be married, they may have children; they
are good wives and good mothers; but their souls are too large for a
single passion. Their world blesses them, worships them, makes saints of
them, but no man has ever touched the bottom of their hearts. I suppose
their husbands are happy in the general happiness, yet they must be sad
some days, over this barren love. Hours come when they must long, even for
the little heart of a coquette that has dedicated itself to one other and
with that other would trustingly venture into hell.

Well, that universal love is the only kind such spirits as you and I
should be, could know. Would that content you?

We should sit mournfully silent, two impotent hearts, and remember,
remember. I should worship your exquisite body as I had known it on earth.
I should see that head as it bends to-night; I should hear again your
voice in those words you were singing when I passed your way that first
time; and your eyes would burn with the fire of our relinquished love. It
would all come faintly out of the past, deadened by a thin film of
recollection; now it strikes with a fierce joy, almost like a physical
blow, and wakes me to life, to desire.

_She._ Yes. We women say we love the spirit of the man we have chosen, but
it is a spirit that acts and expresses itself in the body. To that body,
with all its habits, so unconscious! its sure force and power, we are
bound--more than the man is bound to the loveliness of the woman he
adores. We--I, it is safer so, perhaps--understand what I see, what I
feel, what I touch, what I have kissed and loved. That is mine and becomes
mine more each day I live with it and possess it. That love of the
concrete is our limitation, so we are told, but it is our joy.

_He_. So we should sit, without words, for we would shrink from speech as
too sad, and we should know swiftly the thought of the other. And when the
sense of our loss became quite intolerable, we should walk on silently, in
a growing horror of the eternity ahead. At last one of us, moved by some
acute remembrance of our deadened selves, would go to the Master of the
Spirits and, standing before him in rebellion, would say: "Cast us out as
unfit for this heaven, and if Thou canst not restore us into that past
state at least give us Hell, where we may suffer a common pain, instead of
this passive calm and contemplation."



THE MEASURE OF JOY IN LIFE.

_She._ Yet, how short it will be! How awful to have the days and weeks and
months slip by, and know that at the best there is only a reprieve of a
few years. I think from this night I shall have my shadow of death. I
shall always be doing things for the last time; a sad life that! And
perhaps we change; as you say, we may become dead in life, prepared for a
different state; and in that change we may find a new joy--a longing for
perfection and peace.

_He_. That would be an acknowledgment of defeat, indeed, and that is the
sad result of so much living. The world has been too hard, we cry--there
is so much heartbreaking, so much misery, so few arrive! We look to
another world where all that will be made right, and where we shall suffer
no more.

Let the others have their opiate. You, at least, I think, are too brave
for that kind of comfort. Does it not seem a little grasping to ask for
eternity, because we have fifty years of action? And an eternity of
passivity, because we have not done well with action? No, the world has
had too much of that coddling, that kind of shuffle through, as if it were
a way station where we must spend the night and make the best of sorry
accommodations. Our benevolence, our warmheartedness, goes overmuch to
making the beds a bit better, especially for the feeble and the sick and
old, and those who come badly fitted out. We help the unfortunate to slide
through: I think it would be more sensible to make it worth their while to
stay. The great philanthropists are those who ennoble life, and make it a
valuable possession. It would be well to poison the forlorn, hurry them
post haste to some other world where they may find the conditions better
suited. Then give their lot of misery and opportunity to another who can
find joy in his burden.

_She._ A world without mercy would be hard--it would be full of a strident
clamor like a city street.

_He._ Mercy for all; no favoritism for a few. Whoever could find a new
joy, a lasting activity; whoever could keep his body and mind in full
health and could show what a tremendous reality it is to live--would be
the merciful man. There would be less of that leprosy, death in life, and
the last problem of death itself would not be insurmountable.

So I think the common men who know things, concrete things,--the price of
grain, if you will; the men of affairs who have their minds on the
struggle; the artists who in paint or words explore new possibilities--all
these are the merciful men, the true comforters whom we should honor. They
make life precious--aside from its physical value.

You know the keen movement that runs through your whole being when you
come face to face with some great Rembrandt portrait. How much the man
knew who made it, who saw it unmade! Or that Bellini's Pope we used to
watch, whose penetrating smile taught us about life. And the greater
Titian, the man with a glove, that looks at you like a live soul, one whom
a man created to live for the joy of other men. In another form, I feel
the same gift of life in a new enterprise: a railroad carried through; a
corrupt government cleaned for the day. And, again, that Giorgione at
Paris, where the men and women are doing nothing in particular, but living
in the sunlight, a joyful, pagan band.

And then think of the simpler, deeper notes of the symphony, the elements
of light and warmth and color in our world, the very seeds of existence. I
count that day the richest when we floated into the Cape harbor in the
little rowboat, bathed in the afternoon sun. The fishermen were lazily
winging in, knowing, like birds, the storm that would soon be on them. We
drank the sun in all our pores. It rained down on you, and glorified your
face and the flesh of your arms and your hands. We landed, and walked
across the evening fields to that little hut. Then nature lived and glowed
with the fervor of actual experience. You and the air and the sun-washed
ocean, all were some great throbs of actualities.

_She._ You remember how I liked to ride with you and sail, the stormy
days. How I loved to feel your body battling even feebly with the wind and
rain. I loved to see your face grow crimson under the lash of the waves,
and then to _feel_ you, alive and mine!

_He._ It would not be bad, a heaven like that, of perpetual physical
presentiment, of storms and sun, and rich fields, and long waves rolling
up the beaches. For nerves ever alive and strung healthily all along the
gamut of sensation! Days with terrific gloom, like the German forests of
the Middle Ages; days with small nights spent on the sea; September days
with a concealed meaning in the air. One would ride and battle and sail
and eat. Then long kisses of love in bodies that spoke.

_She._ And yet, how strange to life as it is is that picture--like some
mediæval song with the real people left out; strange to the dirty streets,
the breakfasts in sordid rooms, the ignoble faces, the houses with failure
written across the door-posts; strange to the life of papa and mamma; to
the comfortable home; the chatter of the day; the horses; the summer
trips--everything we have lived, you and I.

_He._ Incomplete, and hence merely a literary paradise. It is well, too,
as it is, for until we can go to bed with the commonplace, and dine with
sorrow, we are but children,--brilliant children, but with the unpleasant
mark of the child. Not sorrow accepted, my love, and bemoaned; but sorrow
fought and dislodged. He is great who feels the pain and sorrow and
absorbs it and survives--he who can remain calm in it and believe in it.
It is a fight; only the strong hold their own. That fight we call duty.

And duty makes the only conceivable world given the human spirit and the
human frame: even should we believe that the world is a revolving
palæstrinum without betterment. And the next world--the next? It must be
like ours, too, in its action; it must call upon the same activities, the
same range of desires and loves and hates. Grander, perhaps, more adorned,
with greater freedom, with more swing, with a less troubled song as it
rushes on its course. But a world like unto ours, with effort, with the
keen jangle of persons in effort, with sorrow, aye, and despair: for there
must be forfeits!

Is that not better than to slink away to death with the forlorn comfort of
a

"_Requiescat in pace?_"

PARIS, December, 1895.

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