Hutchins Hapgood

“ I know that I have kept off madness a long while now. I have shrunk from 'business' to social anarchy and pure beings, from these again I have shrunk to books and poetry, from these again into the solitude of myself where only I am really at home. Though I have lost my general bearings, I still stand at the helm of myself. I am going to pieces on the rocks of the world, but I still inhabit the realm of the soul. ”

“ One lesson Terry's proud and strenuous soul has never learned: that the deeper and simpler things in social growth we must take on faith. We cannot demand an ideal reason or justification for all social organisation, for the ways that human beings have of living together. The elementary social forms at least must be instinctively and blindly accepted. To go beyond in one's rejection the anarchism of the social communist into what is called individualistic anarchism is mere egotistic madness and has as its only value the possible poetry of a unified personal expression. ”

“ Life is too wonderful, too beautiful to be marred thus by the ends of frayed and worn-out passions, by memories or regrets of you. I have become happy, healthy, and free, free without hardness, and in my freedom and joy I have found my love, my beautiful Terry, whom I may love passionately, tenderly and for ever, the dear ideal one. ”

“ The life instinct in me would not be doomed, but was insistent in its demands and made me flee from insanity and death. So here I am, far away from civilisation, from the madding crowd, away up in the mountains, making a last effort to live the straight free life of Nature's children, a suckling at the breasts of Mother Earth. ”

“ It makes my blood sing and dance. I lie awake the whole night thinking of our meetings and trying to bring them vividly back to me.
"And, do you know, what makes me supremely glad is the feeling that Terry is going to love me again, that I am going to win him back. He thinks that love is an enslaving thing and harmful to the soul, but my dear lovely idealist and dreamer has loved me once and he must love me again. I am so in love with love and almost as fanatical about it as the ecstatic artist is about art: love for love's sake, art for art's sake. ”

“ Thus Terry tries not only to reject the laws of "fat" society, but at times he strives against [160] what he imagines to be the deep laws of the universe: he tries to stem the tide of fate, and this in the name of Truth! It shows how far remote from reality is the truth of the idealist; and yet such an attitude is often forced upon a sensitive spirit by rough contact with imperfect society. Although Terry is the most perfect specimen of the anarchists I have known, yet they all have more or less the quality of idealism so marked in him. ”

“ The human being, rocking to and fro [100] with his little grief, must give way in depth of meaning to him who is rocked with the grief of generations past, present, and to come. It is then that love might rise, love so close to agony that agony cannot last: the love that will search ceaselessly, in the slums, in the dives, throughout all life, for the inevitable, and will accept no alternative and no compromise."
This was the man who met Marie at a critical time of her life. He was about thirty-five years old, had experienced much, had become formed, had rejected society, but not the ideal. ”

“ I must try the chords of my heart, the sympathy of my soul, in open rebellion. The iniquities of civilisation had ruined a fine barbarian in me, and almost made of me a maudlin miscreant, willing to hang upon the skirts of a false [84] society. The Haymarket bomb made me strip again and for a nobler fray.
"Of what avail was it, I reflected, to raise one's voice in the wilderness of theories? How do any good by a social enthusiasm merely expressed in theory? Such thin cerebral structures are shattered to pieces in the ordeal of life. Ah, but this anonymous Avatar, this man with the bomb! ”

“ And because I am only mortal, and because the will to live is stronger than I, I must eat my bread. I often cry when I think of this contemptible weakness. I have often tried to overcome this annoying healthiness of my body. How can people be gourmands? Even Shelley and Keats had to eat. What a repulsive word 'eat' is! I would I could eat my heart and drink my tears. The world is what it is because we must eat. See the whole universe eating and eating itself, over and over! If it were not for this fearful [269] necessity, Terry and I should not, perhaps, have failed in our high attempt! ”

“ She wanted nothing from him but the passionate illusion of sex. And she parted from him without tenderness and without explanations, to take up with other men and boys in the same spirit of serious recklessness. She had for the time lost hope, and therefore, of course, care for herself, and her intense and passionate nature strove to live itself out to the limit: an instinct for life and at the same time for destruction.
From this period of her life comes a story which she wrote for me, and which I quote as being typical of her attitude and as throwing light on her personality. ”

“ I have written you the half crazy rhapsodies of a girl intoxicated with the joy of life and health. Now I do indeed think that life is beautiful and worth the living. No, I do not worry about you. I am as happy and care-free as the birds, and live in and for the moment. Everything in the past is dead. ”

“ And her failure to appreciate or reciprocate my respect for the integrity of her personality is the hardest blow she can ever give to me. I have the same fatal charge to make against almost all men; the exceptions are so few and doubtful that I doubt whether I can ever gain from another that intense receptive attitude which I am willing to bestow. Fortunately for me, this illusion that there are such intense perceivers re-creates itself out of the veriest dust and dross of humanity. Like Shelley's 'Cloud,' my illusion may change, but it cannot die. ”

“ Terry feels that somehow deep in his life he has been crucified, that society has nailed him to the cross:
"I was alone on the cross and with bloodshot, beseeching eyes beheld the world objectively. Yet I was aware of a harmony beyond me, though not in me or around me."
It is this "harmony beyond," this religious sense of "something far more deeply interfused" which, ever conscious in the idealist's mind, makes the concrete vision of everyday fact so ugly, leads to anarchism of feeling profound and constant. ”

“ They were both, at times, terribly tired of life: with no strenuous occupation, the word of Nietzsche and of world pessimism, of excessive individuality, tortured their nerves and made everything seem of no avail.
Work takes one away from life, is a buffer between sensitive nerves and intensest experience. Strong natures who for some reason are dislocated and therefore do not work, or work only fragmentarily, come too much in contact with life and often cannot bear it; it burns and palls at once. So it was with Terry and Marie. ”

“ Perhaps a girl is loved only once in a lifetime in just that way, perhaps not at all, and I often think I made a mistake in being so cruel to my boy lover. I might in time have learned to love him in the right way, but I couldn't at that time, perhaps because I was so much occupied with Terry, my own lover, and with the movement, which was new to me and very charming, for I had just discovered it. ”

“ When I am no longer capable of abandoning myself, why continue? Most people seem to me to be dried up. They look as if they never felt anything, so expressionless, so automatic are they, as if they had been wound up to walk and talk, and eat and sleep in precisely the same way for a certain number of years. This seems to be the American type. I suppose you have read of the Caruso affair—how he kissed a woman in Central Park, or wanted to, and the howl it made? The way they all jumped on him, in the name of morality! ”

“ I know you understand as nearly as is possible for one of your class, and yet I doubt if you can really [208] sympathise with the ideas of anarchism which springs naturally from only one class—the labour class. Do you not hesitate sometimes and doubt that all men are worthy of the better things of life, the coalheaver as well as the banker and artist? Even I hesitate sometimes, when I see the coarseness and ignorance of these poor plodders of earth, and when I think of all the really great things that slavery has accomplished. ”

“ Perhaps this fact accounts for Tolstoi's contempt for some of the classic art. It seems to me that most classic art is one of two things: either it smacks of smug content and over-fed geniality or it is permeated with a profound pessimism. The philosophers are worse than the artists; they are the ringleaders of the betrayers of humanity. Art at least makes the atonement of beauty for its mistakes, but this cannot be said of philosophy. ”

“ Have you ever noticed the searching dry gaze of the poor? It is like the seeing, wistful look of a child—which few can bear without flinching. I had no need to read Dante's imaginary 'Inferno.' I was living in a real one which made all imagination seem trivial. 'The short and simple annals of the poor' seems like poetry, but only superficially, for it is not truth, but a fiction. ”

“ The world cannot, in the end, endure the idealist, though it has great need of him. The world can endure a certain amount of irritation, a certain amount of fundamental revolt, but when that revolt reaches the point of absolute rejection, the world rebels, the worm turns. Marie represents the world and the worm.
Plato said there should be no poets in his Republic. Poets are too disturbing, they fit into no social organisation, for the truth they see is larger and often other than the truth of mankind's housekeeping, of human society. So they are against society. ”

“ As a convalescent victim of this proletarian practice I am well aware of its ravages on body and mind. It is the will-of-the-wisp of false whiskey followed by false hope, leading into the fogs and bogs of the bourgeois and the quicksands of the capitalist.
"To be a moment late, means to be docked and to have it rubbed in by an insult. To take a day off, well—death is taken as an excuse. There is no such thing in a shop as social equality between boss and men. ”

“ I remember how kindly and sadly she said to me once, when I had spent half the night out with a young man: 'Little Marie, it is a sad thing in life that what seems to us the sweetest and the best, and what indeed is the sweetest and the best, often leads to our harm and the harm of others. It would be foolish of me to pretend to know which of your actions is good and which is bad; but remember that life is very difficult and hard to lead right, and that you must be careful and always thoughtful of what is good and what is evil. ”

“ That toiling humanity—the labour movement—to me is a thing so vast, that whatever other movements try to exclude themselves from it, they must be swallowed up in it. All other things are but the shadows cast behind or before the ever-marching phalanx of the unconquerable, the imperishable proletaire. This is the hope which sends its thrill through us when nothing else can. ”

“ Poor girl! she is really the Madonna of the Chicago movement. All the sorrows and troubles of the Salon rest upon her poor shoulders, and she silently suffers, sacrifices and redeems. Then there is little Sara, another chosen one. It is she who is chosen to make men miserable for the good of their souls. She has been very pensive since the great poet B—— left, for now she has no one to worry about. I suggested to her that she might worry about Terry, if she liked, and she said she would try, with a weary little sigh. ”

“ How finely elemental, how responsive to the best and the worst, is the mob when the crisis comes!
"Although my thoughts were forming through my readings and the larger events about me, the everyday life in the shop was perhaps the deepest cause of my growing revolt. The atmosphere of the frenzied factory is well calculated to produce a spirit of sullen and smouldering rebellion in the minds of its less hardened inmates. From the domineering boss down to the smallest understrapper, the spirit of the jailer and turnkey is dominant. ”

“ Each day brings a new, wonderful experience; and each day I feel a real part of the great wonderful scheme of things. Indeed, I am becoming a part of nature. I have grown so straight and tall, and so beautifully thin and supple that I can dart in and out of the stream without bumping myself against the rocks, can climb steep hills, and let the winds blow me where they will. ”

“ How many free spirits have been caught and hampered in the quagmire of conservatism. Yet they have the homing instinct of all winged things: they return to the soul and seek to throw off the fat and heavy flesh of social stupidity. ”

“ My joy cannot find place within the four walls which shut out the misery and brutality of the world.
"How be a mouthpiece for the poor? How can art master the master-problem? They who have nothing much to say, often say it well and in a popular form; they are unhampered by weighty matters. It takes an eagle to soar with a heavy weight in its grasp. ”

“ But now I see that we are all the mob, that all human beings are alike, and that all I or anyone can do is to save his own soul, to win his own freedom, and perhaps to teach others to do the same, not so much through social propaganda as by digging down to a deeper personal culture. ”