Hutchins Hapgood

“ We are fighting a losing fight, and we need sympathy and love and friendship.
It is perhaps that which makes my need of her almost fierce. When the universe fails, the need of a personal relation becomes so intense that all peace is lost. It is said that a woman who is passing through the change of life often undergoes an exaggeration, a stimulation of sexual desire. And perhaps with a man his need for an intense exclusive relation grows painfully greater, as the fire flares up into a brighter flame just before it is extinguished forever and passes into the coldness of old age. ”

“ The thing in her which all my instincts as well as all my philosophy and thought rejects is her inability to feel for me at the moment she feels for another! This is the eternal jar, the perception which takes from the harmony of life, from the unity of the universe. As I have written, all through life I have instinctively and consciously struggled to hold all the essential elements of my life together,—not to drop anything out of what has once been seen as beautiful. In this painful effort to maintain our deeper memory, what we call the soul is born. ”

“ His intensity was for her alone, and he was willing to break all else and give her freedom—freedom from morality, from anxiety, from responsibility, from law—from me! It was the eternal advantage of the lover over the husband.
I was too good, she said to me, in constant moving criticism. She meant I was not free to be an exciting self, a pure and life-giving form. I did not make the last appeal to her imagination, for I was bound, she thought, by all things not myself. ”

“ And this broader love for her immediately re-acted upon all my other interests,—my work, my feeling about society and religion—giving to these greater warmth and passion. Thus the ocean swells to and fro, the tides roll in and out, and there is a strange, vibrating relation between all things, each enhancing the meaning of all else. So that it is impossible for a lover to have a mistress, in the sense of having a woman with whom he has a sensual relation only, for a lover loves all things. ”

“ And she still grows!
I suppose what drew us together was Wonder. I marveled at her strange and beautiful integrity, the wholeness and calmness of her being. My vivid nature, my tremulous needs, my spiritual restlessness, interested her. I loved her, and for me she felt a deep amusement. The strangeness I felt in her seemed beautiful; the strangeness she felt in me seemed interesting and amusing. And for years the only word of approval I ever heard from her was the word “amusing.” I can imagine Mona Lisa saying the same word, in exactly the same spirit, meaning intellectually entertaining. ”

“ And when, sternly driven by the doctor into the adjoining room, I heard her low, unconscious moans, as the child came ripping from her womb,—deep, suffering sounds which did not seem to come from her but from the world in travail, from the body of Nature itself, sounds not so much human as cosmic, even then there was no turmoil nor violence nor nervousness. It seemed deeply impersonal,—the pain, the sound—to come from the depths of life and death, from a great, a terrible distance, and without petulance, too deep, too all-embracing to be noisy. ”

“ And soon afterwards came that full physical beauty, that springing of the blood and of the body, that intense enhancement of color and swelling of contour which gave her the look of a gorgeous Magdalene; more delicate in quality than Rubens or Titian, but suggesting both, richer and more voluptuous than the early Florentine painters, yet having the recessional purity of the Giottesque or Siennese madonna! No virgin could equal her full beauty. No lover could so richly love a maiden were it not for the unconscious purpose of this ultimate fruition! ”

“ As the time of her deliverance from the first born approached, a minor note of quiet gayety modified the harsher noises of life. It was as if the child, which long since had begun to move and stir in the womb, had begun to prevail, and to insist upon a smiling interpretation and a cheerful attitude. The atmosphere of children, in which our relation has existed for an eternity, began to form before the first of our four children was born. ”

“ I imagine that experience increases one’s need to give oneself,—to work, to others’ needs, to the impersonal demand of Life. At any rate in me this has been an ever-growing passion, and as I felt more strongly about the world, about art and literature and Labor and society, I felt more strongly about women, and loved them always more, and this love was in part a measure of their need of me! ”

“ At other times, when I see the deep harmony now in her relation with children and with her outside world, I feel the distance she has gone. In a way, the years have brought about a change in both of us and in our mutual relations and attitudes. In some measure the nagging soul is dead in me, and in her there is a far greater adjustment to children, neighbors and engagements, a greater feeling for what I have called the minor moralities of society. And as I see the outside world and the universe in grayer and grayer hues, her vision is brighter and more cheerful. ”

“ Life is spiritual. The simple things are the great mysteries. What must happen is the only beautiful. The accidental is never lovely. Her first pregnancy was to me a source of never-ending wonder and delight. The richness, the [Pg 38] color, the quiet of it! The sensitive calmness that pervaded her whole being! The lovely adjustment of what she had been to what she was about to be. What poise at each step, what breathing, expanding life! How she seemed in deep unconsciousness to brood like a spirit over her wonderful body—the body that was as much a part of her as her spirit. ”

“ A love in which the temperament plays no part, but to which all that has been between us—pleasure, pain, difficulties, work and infidelities—give an indescribable solidity and depth. Nothing on earth can separate us. Our relation, indeed, is built on a fortress which nothing but a double death can destroy, and perhaps not even that! ”

“ The lover passionately wills the continuing of the same, but deeper than his will is his unconscious instinct which is preparing the unknown addition, the fascinating new danger. I remember, as if it were yesterday, her despair when she first knew she was to have a child. It was not so much because she felt the impending change in our relation—for, as I have written, I was not then and am not now sure that she ever fully accepted that relation—as it was the intrusion into her nature and life of something unknown and seemingly foreign. ”

“ These great structures of philosophy seemed to me to be houses of cards, toys for imaginative children. And at the same time there burst upon me, with renewed intensity, the world of sensuous art, the direct, disturbing force of Nature, the mysterious appeal of Woman. Philosophy had prepared me for a greater absorption in life than would otherwise have been possible. It helped to make me incapable of what men call practical life, and made me attach values only to significant things. ”

“ Indeed, she never was more desirable to me than when she seemed, through some excluding instinct for another, infinitely remote. I might hate her, but she appeared then as a resplendent being.
I saw from what she coolly told me that she was prepared to give him whatever he needed or asked. Just because of her aloofness she was capable of a rich though cool sympathy which saw him as beautiful partly because he needed—a strong being who needed—who seemed to need her. I felt the beauty of her attitude. To be ready always to meet a need is beautiful. ”

“ So I find in writing of our European experience among the completer products of human personality and art that there is an inevitable note of frivolity, even though it has a touch of the sad and the pathetic; it lacks passion and intensity.
We played together, this lady and I, but we were not on an equality, for I was living with my wife—how strange and inadequate it seems to refer to her as my wife!—and to this absorbing relation were added my work and the children, and she, the lady with whom I played, was living alone. ”

“ This wonderful time that makes happy and normal at once—that gives color and joy and sensuous pleasure and at the same time frees one from the too great intensity of an unsatisfied desire! The wonderful, ornate honeymoon when the full beauty of your mistress is revealed to you, but when this beauty has the cooling and pleasing and caressing quality of Nature and no longer corrodes and harasses and waylays and deeply troubles! ”

“ It puts him in a mood where respectability and all its institutions seem a higher form of injustice and robbery and makes him see the criminal, the outcast and the disinherited with a new and wondering sympathy; not a sympathy which expresses itself in benevolence and effort toward reform, but a mental and imaginative sympathy which sees in revolution the hope of a more vital art and literature, a deeper justice and a richer human existence; a sympathy which is in its character æsthetic—the sympathy of the social artist, not of the mere reformer or of the narrow labor agitator. ”

“ It was before the beginning of what seemed to me later the complexities of life, the intricacies of human relations, those many-hued and contradictory threads which render dangerous the love relation and threaten its duration, but at the same time prevent its atrophy. And in spite of the danger there is something that urges on every strenuous lover to dig deeper down into the wonderful being he is living with. It is a sound instinct which tells us that unless there is development there is death. ”

“ He ever approaches but never attains the brooding dignity and sensitive peace of the pregnant woman.
The soul of every beautiful thing is quiet. Much of the time she was so quiet and so unresponsive that there was no place for me in her presence. Often I went away from her, irritated by her very perfection; by her self-sufficiency and calm; went away from what I loved and what I prized, to occupy myself with transient things, experiences and strangers—with work, with women, and with boon companions! ”

“ And I do not think that it is only my vanity and egotism which makes me feel so—my intense and morbid desire for temperamental sympathy. That exists, it is true, but in this brooding nature there is something impersonally beautiful, unexplained by my egotistic needs. The seed as it bursts quietly in spring-warmed earth is beautiful, not because it does not interrupt us in our feverish futilities, but because in itself it is adequately and richly significant of the whole urge of life. ”

“ This inaccessible woman, approaching middle age, more loving to me and more remote than ever, consciously rejecting me as a lover and accepting me warmly as a child, her complete and impersonal loveliness, is the one perfect experience of my life, the experience that permeates and affects all others, that has subtly intertwined itself in my love for children and nature, for work and for the destiny of my fellow-men. ”

“ Often I have stood on the brink of failure, and I do so at this moment, filled with a kind of helpless dread, not knowing how to shape the clay of life, to draw the line that is instinctively right, that gives the vital equilibrium of art. I feel at times that this terrific longing of mine is a criminal instinct. Is it not a crime for a man to want to be pregnant? To want to be mutually pregnant? Does it not show a passionate invasiveness, an almost incredible desire for violation of [Pg 54] another’s personality? Is it not terrible and ugly, rather than beautiful? ”

“ We tried to pass it off in external gayety and sensuous pleasure, but sad intensity lived in all of us. In me the deeper jealousy was threatening to overcome my assumed and superficial civilization. And in him I felt the strong and nervous impulse to make a radical break, to insist on a new deal which would nullify the past and open up for him and her—my Her!—a remote and faery life apart from all the world! And in her there began a self-destructive schism, an unexpressed struggle which meant for her something far more strenuous than any other situation of her life. ”

“ How different all this was from those April days of the honeymoon! It seemed as if thousands of years had intervened, and that just because we had been in part successful in the [Pg 70] art of love, had mutually given and taken and partly destroyed one another and accepted from and given to others, and loved children and art and literature, and taken as fully as we could what came to us from life, just because of all that richness, our relation had become one that meant the constant possibility and at times the actuality of almost unbearable pain! ”

“ I saw how deep and all-embracing, and really how destructive of our conventions and minor moralities, the philosophy of the proletarian really is; how it strips society to the essential! It destroys the values we put on personal property as it points out with intensity the enslaving function of possessions. A conception of a social order whose morality, law, art and conventions are formed about the economic advantage of a dominant few startles [Pg 104] the mind and the imagination and turns the strenuous soul to an analysis of the fundamentals. ”

“ Very few lovers go beyond the sketch. Few have the enduring power, the artistic patience to build the relation into an essential form. It is perhaps for this reason that love is not regarded as an art at all. It is too difficult.
Men and women fall in love with one another. They catch glimpses of that most beautiful thing—that unseen thing—the soul of the opposite sex as incarnate in the body—and under the excitement of that perception, they are in love. ”

“ To accept well marked out conceptions of morality and norms of beauty is the easier way. To try to reconstruct the basis on which our feelings express themselves is a task indeed for the gods. And since men and women are not unlimited, these idealists among them fell frequently and bit the dust of humiliation and despair. Old tradition and old instinct proved stronger than they and, filled with commonplace jealousy, a new pain was added to the old—they were not only crudely and madly jealous but they also hated themselves for being so! ”

“ Here I am at middle life living with the one woman I want to live with, hopeful for my fine children, interested in a work I have chosen and which was not forced upon me, rich in friends, in good health, and seeing progressively the sad splendid beauty of Nature and Art, hopeful for man’s struggle to break his bonds and interested in coöperating with him, and yet, in spite of all, passionately unsatisfied! ”

“ Sometimes the pain seemed almost to break the relation and separate us inevitably, but that which brought us back with a fuller emotion was the impersonal pleasure of contemplation, which to some extent enabled us to see ourselves as if we were others and to be pleased and amused by the spectacle. Art is a significant amusement, and as I have written, there was in each of us, an unconscious attempt to see life as art, impersonally though warmly. ”