Literary Love-Letters | Page 4

that facts kill, but you shall have them. I had
meditated a delightful sheet of love that has been disdainfully shoved
into the waste-basket. A grave moral there for you, my lady!
Do you remember when I was very young and gauche? Doubtless, for
women never forget first impressions of that sort. You dressed very
badly, and were quite ceremonious. I was the bantling son of one of
your father's provincial correspondents, to adopt the suave term of the
foreigners. I had been sent to Chicago to fit for a technical school,
where I was to learn to be very clever about mill machinery. Perhaps
you remember my father--a sweet-natured, wiry, active man, incapable
of conceiving an interest in life that was divorced from respectability. I
think he had some imagination, for now and then he was troubled about
my becoming a loafer. However, he certainly kept it in control: I was to
become a great mill owner.
It was all luck at first: you were luck, and the Tech. was luck. Then I
found my voice and saw my problem: to cross my father's aspirations,
to be other than the Wabash mill owner, would have been cruel. You
see his desires were more passionate than mine. I worried through the

mechanical, deadening routine of the Tech. somehow, and finally got
courage enough to tell him that I could not accept Wabash quite yet. I
had the audacity to propose two years abroad. We compromised on one,
but I understood that I must not finally disappoint him. He cared so
much that it would have been wicked. A few people in this world have
positive and masterful convictions. An explosion or insanity comes if
their wills smoulder in ineffectual silence. Most of us have no more
than inclinations. It seems wise and best that those of mere inclinations
should waive their prejudices in favor of those who feel intensely. So
much for the great questions of individuality and personality that set
the modern world a-shrieking. This is a commonplace solution of the
great family problem Turgénieff propounded in "Fathers and Sons."
Perchance you have heard of Turgénieff?
So I prepared to follow my father's will, for I loved him exceedingly.
His life had not been happy, and his nature, as I have said, was a more
exacting one than mine. The price of submission, however, was not
plain to me until I was launched that year in Paris in a strange,
cosmopolitan world. I was supposed to attend courses at the École
Polytechnique, but I became mad with the longings that are wafted
about Europe from capital to capital. I went to Italy--to Venice and
Florence and Rome--to Athens and Constantinople and Vienna. In a
word, I unfitted myself for Wabash as completely as I could, and
troubled my spirit with vain attempts after art and feeling.
You women do not know the intoxication of five-and-twenty--a few
hundred francs in one's pockets, the centuries behind, creation ahead.
You do not know what it is to hunger after the power of understanding
and the power of expression; to see the world as divine one minute and
a mechanic hell the next; to feel the convictions of the vagabond; to
grudge each sunbeam that falls unseen by you on some mouldering
gate in some neglected city, each face of the living wherein possible
life looks out untried by you, each picture that means a new curiosity.
No, for, after all, you are material souls; you need a Bradshaw and a
Baedeker, even in the land of dreams. All men, I like to think, for one
short breath in their lives, believe this narrow world to be shoreless.
They feel that they should die in discontent if they could not experience,

test, this wonderful conglomerate of existence. It is an old, old matter I
am writing you about. We have classified it nicely, these days; we call
it the "romantic spirit," and we say that it is made three parts of youth
and two of discontent--a perpetual expression of the world's pessimism.
I look back, and I think that I have done you wrong. Women like you
have something nearly akin to this mood. Some time in your lives you
would all be romantic lovers. The commonest of you anticipate a
masculine soul that shall harmonize your discontent into happiness.
Most of you are not very nice about it; you make your hero out of the
most obvious man. Yet it is pathetic, that longing for something beyond
yourselves. That passionate desire for a complete illusion in love is the
one permanent note you women have attained in literature. In your
heart of hearts you would all (until you become stiff in the arms of an
unlovely life) follow a cabman, if he could make