Chapter VI: Thyrsis

I.

The young poet’s struggle with human nature is told at length in _Love’s Pilgrimage_. With the information there given, and with inferences of our own, we may draw this brief outline of the origins of that struggle in his mind.

A pattern of fear--fear of the outside world--had existed in his mind since early childhood. Specifically it concerned drinking. “In his earliest childhood he had known that his father was preyed upon, just as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At first the enemies had been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who tempted him to drink with them. The names of these men were household words to him, portents of terror; they peopled his imagination as epic figures, such as Black Douglas must have been to the children of the Northern Border. But then, with widening intelligence, it became certain social forces, at first dimly apprehended. It was the god of ‘business’--before which all things fair and noble went down.” And as this conception of the vast network and conspiracy of worldly evil was widening in the intellectual realm into an intelligent and useful theoretical understanding of the nature of capitalist society, in the meanwhile--or so we may conclude--it was broadening in the untutored realm of the unconscious mind into a more or less morbid fear of woman, as the other great “temptation” of life. And what is said in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ specifically of his fear of the one temptation can be read as covering the other: “Outwardly he was like other boys, eager and cheerful, even boisterous; but ... life had made him into an ascetic. He must be stern, even merciless, with himself--because of the fear that was in him.... The fear that self-indulgence might lay its grisly paws upon him!” “So it was that the soul of this lad had grown somber, and taken to brooding upon the mysteries of fate. Life was no jest and no holiday, it was no place for shams and self-deceptions. It was a place where cruel enemies set traps for the unwary; a field where blind and merciless forces ranged, unhindered by man or God.”

It would not be strange if love itself were to come to seem to this boy one of these “traps”. But at first it was only the simpler forms of the sexual temptation that he feared. Not, indeed, in its grosser form, as in prostitution; to one with his fastidiousness of temperament this was no temptation; “the thought of a woman who sold herself for money”--he had first heard of this strange transaction at college--“could never bring him anything but shuddering.” Yet there were real temptations. “All about his lodging-house lived the daughters of the poor, and these were a snare for his feet.” At recurrent intervals a restlessness would interrupt his serenity of work and study “and he would go out into the night and wander about the streets for hours, impelled by a futile yearning for he knew not what--the hope of something clean in the midst of uncleanness, of some adventure that would be not quite shameful to a poet’s fancy”--only to steal home unsatisfied, “baffled and sick at heart”. He took, with some embarrassment, these troubles to his clergyman friend, who told him of his own youthful struggle--“which had resulted in victory, for he had never known a woman”. He emphasized the importance of the boy’s choice: “On the one hand was slavery and degradation and disease; and on the other were all the heights of the human spirit.” He was eloquently recommended to “save and store” his sexual energy, so that this base metal might become “transmuted to the gold of intellectual and emotional power”. Such, he was assured, was the “universal testimony of the masters of the higher life”. Tennyson’s Galahad was referred to, whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure.... Nor was this to be a denial of love, but on the contrary its consecration. Some day he would meet the woman he was to cleave to, whom of course he would expect to be a virgin; and he must do her as much honor--“he must save the fire and fervor of his young desire for his life’s great consummation”. And a “compact” was made, according to which the youth was to write to the man every month and tell him of his “success or failure”. In times of trial, the thought of having to confess the truth to his friend was “like a sword hanging over him”, and this alone was, on such occasions, what kept him to his vow. Ordinarily, in a life so dominated by fear of sex, the temptations are of a merely imaginative sort, since there is lacking the courage to undergo those preliminaries of approach to the opposite sex which must occur before the temptation can be of a very realistic nature. But this youth’s masculine enterprise was not so wholly chained up as that, it would appear, for _Love’s Pilgrimage_ recounts one such hour of trial, in which a spirited girl at a summering-place yields to his fiery importunities and makes a date with him, only to be met by an ashamed youth who has in the meantime conquered these impulses of his baser nature and now offers her his agonized apology for his caddishness, together with some moral generalizations on the subject. “Preaching won’t help it any,” she says; “I don’t want to hear it. Good-bye.” For this, and other such vergings upon surrender, he would punish himself by “months of toil and penance and of savage self-immolation.... For several months at a time he would go without those kinds of food that he liked; and instead of going to bed at one o’clock he would read the New Testament in Greek for an hour.” These moral struggles are reminiscent of Tolstoy’s, early and late in life; except that Tolstoy was reproaching and punishing himself for sins actually, rather than almost, committed. Like Tolstoy, he kept self-reminding diaries and wrote exhortations to himself. And, being an agnostic and unable to use the ordinary theological forms of prayer, “he fashioned new invocations for himself: prayers to the unknown sources of his vision, to the new powers of his own soul--‘the undiscovered gods’, as he called them.” And “above all he prayed to his vision of the maiden who waited the issue of this battle and held the crown of victory in her keeping....”

This ideal of a future sweetheart began to take shape in his mind. Some lines by the English bachelor-schoolmaster, Cory, were like a refrain to his thoughts on this subject:

“Somewhere beneath the sun,
These quivering heart-strings prove it,
Somewhere there must be one
Made for this soul to move it; ...
_Some one whom I could court
With no great change of manner,
Still holding reason’s fort,
Though waving fancy’s banner._”

First of all, that is to say, she should be one who would take him as she found him; an inspiration to him (of course), she should inspire him to go on doing precisely what he wanted to do; hers was to be the surrender, not his in any degree. A sufficiently unlikely young creature, yet one for which the young poet is inevitably bound to wish. For the rest, she should be of an angelic purity and goodness.[6]

II.

The vision of a distant wedded bliss, the reward of abstinence as promised him by his clergyman friend, sufficed for a time; but his poetic ambitions came presently to trouble and disturb that hope. As a poet, doomed to poverty, he would be economically unable to accept those conventions of marriage under which a husband is required to support his wife.... These material limitations may have served to halt the development of his love-ideals in a boyish stage. Nor is that to be wondered at. A poet, in a society in which poetry is ordinarily a neglected and unrewarded art, is faced by the painful choice of renouncing either his art or the normal masculine satisfactions involved in giving protection--a home, food, clothes--to his beloved. He, then, was obliged to conceive their companionship in other than terms of ordinary marriage. To take a wife, in the conventional sense, would be to chain himself for life and give up all hope of achievement in his art. And this very real danger to himself as an artist could but reinforce his morbid fear of the actualities of sex, and confirm him in his reluctance to assume an adult masculine rôle.

Under these not unfamiliar circumstances, the artist as a young man sometimes accepts the compromise of casual, temporary and irresponsible relationships; but to an ascetic young artist of high ideals these were impossible. He was able to conquer his merely physical instincts; but what would happen when he actually fell in love? Would he fall blindly into the “trap” set by nature? If not, how would he seek to avoid it?... In the meantime, at nineteen and twenty, he cultivated the art of music, as a means of sublimating these troublesome emotions, attended concerts, worshipped the hero-soul of Beethoven, and practised till his fingers were raw and his back aching, on the violin. In summer, in the country with his mother, he would take his violin into the fields and play all day to the squirrels. A musician, arriving at that summer resort, driving over in the hotel bus, heard an Italian woman in the street singing the ‘Tannhaüser March’. He asked the woman where she learned it; and she explained: “Dey ees a crazy feller in de woods--he play it all day for t’ree weeks!”

At the age of twenty-one, it seemed to him that with the help of music he had “beaten his devils”, and come to be “master of himself”.

Then he went to the country to write his book.

III.

The first fury of his creative impulse had barely spent itself when his mother and another woman, her oldest friend, arrived to spend the summer in a boarding-house in a village near Quebec, and with them the other woman’s daughter, a dark-eyed girl of twenty. The girl brought his lunches to the negligent young poet at work in his cabin in the woods, and a companionship was begun, with emotional consequences that made it difficult enough for him to concentrate on his work as a young poet should. They were, in fact, before the summer was over, involved in the torments and problems of first love.

She was a girl whom he had admired for her beauty, but scorned for her submissiveness, and never for a moment in his imagination cast in the heroic rôle of a poet’s mate. Not was she, apparently, at all suited to such a rôle. From the worldly point of view, a poet’s mate should doubtless be an eminently practical and capable person; and from the poet’s own point of view she should be by temperament and education able to understand and sympathize with his ambitions. None of these things was true of this dark-eyed girl of twenty. She was spoiled and wilful, fond of leisure and comfort, fond of play, with a deep capacity for the pagan enjoyment of life. And perhaps it was these very qualities, the dramatic complement of his own impersonal, fanatic, Puritanical qualities, which attracted him to her.... That can be understood; and it can be understood that he should fool himself into thinking that he was going to educate and train her to be like himself I But what perversity of feminine nature could have so laid open her young girl’s heart to the worship of this scornful youth, and made her, not merely fall in love with him as a summer’s idle diversion, but be ready to go with him upon his own harsh terms into a life of poverty and struggle? Perhaps it was the charm of his distinction, for he was certainly like no other man she had ever known: though she might have considered him as a well-brought-up young girl should, merely “queer”.

Perhaps it was something authoritarian and quasi-parental in his attitude toward her; for he began his wooing by scolding her for the kind of life she lived--for being an idle butterfly.

Then this conversation:

She: “But people aren’t to blame for the lives they live!”

He: “Why not?”

She: “Because--they can’t help them. They are bound fast.”

He: “They should break loose.”

She: “That is easy for you to say. You have no ties.”

He: “I did have them--I might have them still. But I broke them.”

She: “Ah, but you are a man!”

He: “What difference does that make?”

She: “It makes all the difference in the world. You can earn money, you can go away by yourself. But suppose you were a girl--shut up in a home, and told that was your ‘sphere’?”

He: “I’d fight--I’d break my way out somehow, never fear. If one doesn’t break out, it simply means that his desire isn’t strong enough.”

So it begins. It might be a Russian wooing of the Nihilist period. It seems that the butterfly has a soul, and truly desires freedom. The young Nihilist tells her sternly that she must work for her salvation. She begs humbly for instructions, for tasks--and he sets them. He lectures her on Christianity, on marriage, on the wrongness of the world as it is; and she listens with glowing eyes. Of course the master reads his unfinished masterpiece to his pupil; she thinks it wonderful.... Kisses begin to mingle with these lectures; boy and girl kisses, cool as the touch of a flower. Yet even kisses such as these awaken in his mind the reverberations of an old alarm; and he commences to explain to her the essential loneliness of his destiny as a poet. “And do you expect to have no human relationships as long as you live?” she asks in awe. They discuss that. There is, it seems, a possible mate for him. But she would have to endure every privation. He would not turn aside one step for her sake. No, rather he would drive her as mercilessly as he drove himself, up the steep hill toward perfection. Not, one would think, an alluring prospect for a joy-loving young girl! Yet it fails to frighten her. He quotes in warning:

“Maiden! a nameless life I lead,
A nameless death I’ll die;
The fiend whose lantern lights the mead
Were better mate than I!”

And now, in a month or two of companionship, she has had good reason to know how realistically true that warning is. She knows how much more important his book is to him than her mere company. He sets her to learning German. He scolds her for not learning it instantly. A sufficiently quaint courtship! But he is her master; she takes gladly what he gives, the lectures, the scoldings, and, more infrequently, the kisses. He is ashamed of kissing, as an unworthy weakness--and doubtless also a waste of good time that might have been devoted to further counsels of perfection. And presently it is understood that she is his mate; by no means his perfect mate as yet, but presumably to be perfected by further lectures, scoldings, and German lessons. Of course, it is made clear, they are not sweethearts in any ordinary sense. There has been already too much of kissing and petting; she is to get down to her German, and grind away at that, so that some day she may be his intellectual equal....

In _Love’s Pilgrimage_, where this courtship is described in detail, the girl is called Corydon and the boy Thyrsis. The choice of those names, Thyrsis and Corydon, for the principals in this boy-and-girl romance, is relevant to the boyish and poetic ideal which the young lover so gallantly and absurdly attempted to impose upon the recalcitrant facts of their human nature. The original Thyrsis and Corydon, in Greek and Roman pastoral poetry, were shepherd-boys and dear friends; and it was such an idyllic and quasi-boyish companionship in thought and work, without any of the disturbing influences of sex, that this young lover had in mind. He was spiritually unprepared for any surrender to the tempestuous waves of man-and-woman love; and if he was so harsh and graceless in his treatment of his young sweetheart, it was out of fear. And he may well have been afraid. He seemed to be the master in this relationship, the dictator of hard terms which she meekly accepted. Yet was he truly in control of the situation? Or did this girl submit with such proud humility because her heart knew a secret which he had yet to learn?

His learning of it proceeded slowly. Their talk and their studies lasted late into the night at the lonely cabin in the woods. The gossip of a summer resort community can be imagined, and the alarm of the two mothers. The young people, conscious of their purity, could only despise a world which thought that love necessarily meant “obscenity”. “Everybody is thinking obscenity about us!” he said to her indignantly. They stubbornly persisted in their companionship until the girl was taken away to New York.... Now the young poet had time to write on his book in peace; yet his thoughts of her gave him no peace, and he spent the precious hours of his hard-bought freedom in writing long letters to her. Not love-letters, precisely; they were scoldings on paper, because the thought of her kept him from his work; exhortations, warnings. He was trying to escape from her. Yet it was not she, after all, who held him fast caught in that net; it was something within himself, battling against his fears--the rash desire for life. Then furiously he threw himself into the task of writing, to escape the problem which confronted him.

The fact seemed to be that he had taken this girl’s destinies into his own hands; she was his. But upon what terms? He had preached his quaint Tolstoyan-Tennysonian idealism to her, and she had accepted it; she was ready to live with him as a sister in one room in New York that winter. This plan was reluctantly renounced on medical advice; apparently it was not so easy to live an ideal life in defiance of the conventional world.[7] What choice then was left except abandonment of a spiritual responsibility he had undertaken--or ordinary marriage? That autumn he came to New York knowing dazedly that he was going to marry her.