FITTING INTO LIFE

Growing up year after year in a place like this requires more studious application than taking a master’s degree in a university, where you attend lectures and have a course of reading to defend you from thinking your own thoughts on that subject. It is a fact which you discover for yourself under the circumstances that ‘knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.’ We are at best no more than the imitators of wisdom. We borrow it, show off in it; but I have yet to see the faintest trace of natural wisdom in man, though the lower animals seem gifted with enough of it not to worry about their fate, whatever fate it is. I reckon this is the reason they remain lower, the damned harnessed victims of their content, as we are the more aspiring victims of our discontent, doubts and anxieties.

I do not think, for example, that a man ever lived who could have conceived the idea of peace. That is something handed down to us by inspiration and tradition from the great beginning. The Lord alone knows what peace is, and He declared it--‘On earth peace, good will toward men.’ We have been repeating that Scripture for ages as children recite verses without the mind to comprehend the meaning. This is not hypocrisy on our part; it is our very nature to be incapable of peace.

After a while you get to the clear place in mind where you can see through so many theories and philosophies, even professions of faith, you know that they are no more than the defenses we throw up against our own weaknesses and fears. One of the touching revelations of this kind to me has been the shrewd way we shift for ourselves at the very last. We get a marvelous confidence in the goodness of God then. We come clean and do see Him, whether we were ever before pure in heart or not.

The last deathbed I attended was that of a notoriously wicked man. No saint could have been more serenely at peace so far as his immortal future was concerned. He had worked hard and sinned fiercely. No man, it seemed, was his brother; but he lay there upon his dingy pillows beneath his ragged quilt with the innocent eyes of a child. He had done with guilt. He was out of pain so far as the Lord was concerned. Lying so wanly weak, never again to move hand or foot, he assured me that he was ready to go. The idea that he would be off presently upon an immeasurable journey was fixed in his mind, accompanied by no fears.

They who stick to their creeds and the meaner mortal facts we all produce in living cannot comprehend the courage of a man like this. In considering his case they remember their favorite damnation doctrines, but never their own transgressions. Nothing will convince them that the Lord is not a theologian, but a Creator; and that a history of His will would be a history of the one fundamental law, not as we understand law, but what He has made it, followed whether you keep it or break it by inevitable consequences.

This man had broken it in his flesh, and was dying for that reason as surely as if he had cut himself down. But now he was forced at last to keep that last most important part of it. With the vision of a child he had learned the meaning of God. He rested serenely upon what we preach and so rarely have the courage to achieve--real faith in God, and it had turned out precisely as the Scriptures promise--eased him of every fear. His sins had been removed as far from his consciousness as presently his body would be. I felt very close and soothingly kin to him, and reverently amazed at this perfect miracle of faith; also glad that he would die and escape that pit of himself into which he surely would have fallen if he had survived.

When you get far down your slope of time, however, and care less than you used to care about being the heroine of your life dolled up in your best deeds, then you can take a look at yourself according to the mind you have now calmed and cooled by the years, and you may come into that last and greatest of all vanities--the boldness to portray the person you really are.

Most people think they do that when they confess their sins; the worse they are the better they are for this purpose. My notion about that is if you must boast, it is more polite to proclaim your virtues. I have always been very courteous to others about that. But the queer thing is that I have never felt that my virtues really belong to me. Lecky’s ‘History of European Morals’ knocked the last ray of conceit out of me about being even a chaste woman. First one virtue and then another seems to have been thrust upon us according to the self-protecting instinct of men against frauds in paternity or some other economy for their comfort and peace of mind.

I am not complaining, you understand. It has all turned out for the best long ago; but I am just saying how queer I feel about having had decency and honor thrust upon us like foreordination by men, instead of choosing these distinctions for ourselves according to the word and will of God as we think we do. I have wondered if other women feel the same way about this. But I have never had the courage to ask the question point-blank. I have a sort of premonition that most of us are so ignorant of the processes by which we become virtue-bearing in an unvirtuous world that almost any woman might resent the question.

But I suppose our sins do actually belong to us. However, there is practically no originality about them. We can only commit two or three, the others are mere variation of the same perversities. My notion is that there is not much satisfaction to be had from exposing them. If you make an art, a literature, or a science of your vices, the result is some kind of puerile decadence, not entertaining to normal people.

In any case, I have been a very dull person along this line. To the best of my knowledge I have never committed an interesting sin, nor one that even held my own attention for longer than the moment it took to get rid of it by prayer and repentance. For this reason I am obliged to confine myself to the moderate activities of that narrow and monotonous existence already mentioned with becoming heat in these pages.

Looking back now through the mirror of my mind, the thing that astonishes me most is that nothing seems to have changed me. I made my little history of courage, honor and sacrifices, and from start to finish I can trace the silent, invincible child I was through all the women I have become in various periods of my life. I lived the whole of it with a curious mental reservation which was myself. I still love with a stronger passion the things that child loved--the earth, the sky, the living things that do not speak, but know and mean so much more than we can think or even tell with all our living or dead languages.

There is a speech in the wind that we do not know, a heroism in Nature that we do not comprehend, some wisdom of beauty in the grass and the faintest flowers that bloom which we shall never achieve, a kind of fearless liberty to live to which we shall never attain with all our ideals and declarations of independence. We only believe that all men are created free and equal and entitled to the pursuit of happiness, but it is something we have never experienced because our minds constrain us. These verdant boughs have no mind, so they live in perfect liberty without our poor fears and transient knowledges. The seeds of the grass that is cut down and withers to-day will spring green above our graves to-morrow with not one memory of pain or death. As a child, I could not have said what drew me to the earth, but it was this feeling of being closer there to life that neither fears nor perishes.

I am poorer in faith than that child was, but I still believe wearily in the same Providence in which she rejoiced. As she went silently about her affairs regardless, so have I gone on doing the thing I meant to do with a determination that will not be defeated. I made no appearance at this business, and do not now attract the least attention at working my will; only the thing accomplished is seen and read, not me. What I mean is that I am literally an unobtrusive person by nature. No one would recognize me except by name. I remember the same shyness as a child at being noticed. I have played my little tunes on the heart of the world, but I never craved to be identified by my strut with my works.