Father Damien | Page 5

an example from the
fields of gallantry? When two gentlemen compete for the favour of a
lady, and the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and (as will
sometimes happen) matter damaging to the successful rival's credit
reaches the ear of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no pretensions
that his mouth is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily closed. Your
Church and Damien's were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: to help,
to edify, to set divine examples. You having (in one huge instance)
failed, and Damien succeeded, I marvel it should not have occurred to
you that you were doomed to silence; that when you had been
outstripped in that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of your
well- being, in your pleasant room - and Damien, crowned with glories
and horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs of
Kalawao - you, the elect who would not, were the last man on earth to
collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would and did.

I think I see you - for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these
sentences - I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical
expression at the best. "He had no hand in the reforms," he was "a
coarse, dirty man"; these were your own words; and you may think it
possible that I am come to support you with fresh evidence. In a sense,
it is even so. Damien has been too much depicted with a conventional
halo and conventional features; so drawn by men who perhaps had not
the eye to remark or the pen to express the individual; or who perhaps
were only blinded and silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly
envy for myself - such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would
envy on your bended knees. It is the least defect of such a method of
portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's advocate, and
leaves the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of truth. For the
truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
The world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if your
letter be the means of substituting once for all a credible likeness for a
wax abstraction. For, if that world at all remember you, on the day
when Damien of Molokai shall be named a Saint, it will be in virtue of
one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.
You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my inclement destiny to
become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde. When I
visited the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave. But such
information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation with those
who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory;
but others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him
with no halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and
through whose unprepared and scarcely partial communications the
plain, human features of the man shone on me convincingly. These
gave me what knowledge I possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it
could be most completely and sensitively understood - Kalawao, which
you have never visited, about which you have never so much as
endeavoured to inform yourself; for, brief as your letter is, you have
found the means to stumble into that confession. "LESS THAN
ONE-HALF of the island," you say, "is devoted to the lepers." Molokai
- "MOLOKAI AHINA," the "grey," lofty, and most desolate island -
along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice into a sea of
unusual profundity. This range of cliff is, from east to west, the true

end and frontier of the island. Only in one spot there projects into the
ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy, stony, windy, and
rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater: the whole bearing to
the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation as a bracket to a
wall. With this hint you will now be able to pick out the leper station on
a map; you will be able to judge how much of Molokai is thus cut off
between the surf and precipice, whether less than a half, or less than a
quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth - or, say a twentieth; and the next time you
burst into print you will be in a position to share with us the issue of
your calculations.
I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness of
that place which oxen and wain-ropes