The Foe of Compromise

THE case for compromise was never put better, perhaps, than it was by moderate American statesmen after the great political compromise of 1850. That adjustment, they said, had saved the Union; and they pointed out to the defeated radicals that the noblest politics are but a compromise. The Union itself, they declared, is a compromise; so is the Constitution, and all social life, and the harmony of the entire universe. With sincere conviction and a genuine fervor they dilated on the blessings we had won by being reasonable. Had we not won peace itself? “With what instantaneous and mighty charm, ” cried Rufus Choate, their orator, the measures of compromise “calmed the madness and anxiety of the hour!” And not peace alone, but love. “How, in a moment, the interrupted and parted currents of fraternal feeling reunited ! ”

Surely, they were right. The analogy of nature, common sense, the experience of mankind, crystallized in proverbs, and all the dignified and honored usage of our human societies ranged themselves on their side. And yet, we did not rest in the peace which they had made. Their contemporary, Garrison, the abolitionist, must have known that all these things were against him; he must have felt how harshly the strife he brought into our Republic of welfare and of opportunity broke in upon the soft music which ears like Choate’s were harking for. Nevertheless, he went on : and soon there was war and death and mourning in the land. Some said that the outcome proved compromise a failure ; more said, it was the fault of Garrison and of the other extremists on both sides. There was peace again, at last: a sure peace for the Republic; surer and deeper for some hundreds of thousands of young men in blue and gray uniforms, mourned a while by young wives and sweethearts, — mourned without ceasing by dim-eyed mothers. The end of compromise and the end of warfare were the same.

And yet, not quite the same; for there is peace, and peace. Which, one wonders, is that peace for which mankind, in all lands, all languages, to all their gods, forever pray ? Which is that peace which we of Christian breeding have been taught to pray for? “The Lord bless us and keep us, the Lord make his face to shine upon us and be gracious unto us, the Lord lift up his countenance upon us and give us peace, now and for evermore.” Is it the peace men win by bargaining with circumstance, by huckstering with life ? Or is it that peace for which they also strive who will not stop to parley, but shout, like the young Octavius, “To the field ! ” Is it the peace of compromise ? Or is it some other peace which shall come at last out of war and conflict, out of “confused noises and garments rolled in blood ? ”

There is no other question so universal or so perpetual as this — for communities or for men. Civilizations, as well as individual lives, diverge with this divergence of the paths of peace. Continents are less divided by the seas than by this disparity of aspiration in the peoples that inhabit them. Asia were Europe, Europe, America, if in Occident and Orient men were like-hearted in their prayers for peace. Like they are — all men are like — in those few simple, primal hungerings and thirstings which deny them peace. We shall not go far wrong if we say that bread, and work, and play, and love symbolize all our wants, for the here and the hereafter. To have these, and have them rightly and of right, is peace; else, there is no peace. Few of us, men or communities, but can have them, and have them all, — in a measure, and by compromise.

Much has been said concerning the bounds of compromise; but they who have spoken and written to the best purpose on this theme have been students of communities, of society. They have reasoned by less or more concerning the greater and the lesser utilities, and they have used the method of science. That, no doubt, was a right point of view, and a right method, for that aspect of the subject. Communities of men are studied most profitably as one studies nature. Their characteristics may be observed and recorded like natural phenomena. The law of their growth and their decay is a natural law, — these laws they make, and the higher law, are only for individuals. The student of society may therefore reason about the bounds of compromise in a way not open to the venturesome searcher of the hearts of men.

But much of our most individual experience comes of our membership in communities ; and by that bridge I wish to pass from the great matter which Garrison and Choate debated to a still greater matter: from the theme of Mr. John Morley’s well-known essay to a theme which is oftener approached in poetry than in such plain prose as this I use; from compromise in the conflict between the greater and the lesser utilities in society to compromise in the long striving of our human souls for peace. More particularly, I wish, if it be possible, to work my way to a clearer understanding — clearer than any I find in books, or in the talk of other men — of what that is which forever rises up in men, as men like Garrison and Morley and the radicals of other times have risen up in all societies, to fight with compromise, whatever form it takes. For my notion is, that there is nothing in us, nothing in the human spirit, more curious and noteworthy than the strange impulse to fight at once with reason and desire.

But passing thus from compromise in the affairs of whole communities, whole societies, to compromise in individual lives, even though we begin with individuals as members of societies, with compromise in patriotism, we make, in truth, a great transition. Our purpose is no longer what Mr. Morley’s was in that finely scrupulous inquiry of his into the laws of the warfare with error; nor can we use his method. We cannot simply take an inventory of the gains and losses, reckoned by more or less, which will ensue to the individual from acquiescence and adjustment, on the one hand, or from resolute adherence to an ideal, on the other hand, or from some middle course. For we have no standard of values in the life of the individual. We can hope for little more than an imperfect view of the conflict in a man’s own breast, a dim observation of the forces which contend there for the mastery of his nature.

To begin, then, with compromise in patriotism, there is, first of all, the man’s own peculiar, personal vision and outlook when he thinks of his country. That, doubtless, is primarily geographical ; it began with the maps at school. But an infinite number of facts, learned he knows not when, of observations made he knows not where, and of impressions taken he knows not how, — in travel, reading, conversation, — have gradually been added, changing and enlarging his conception, until the whole has taken in his thought a mixed, composite character, far beyond the power of language to convey. Parts of the whole will seem to him wrong, unfit, out of joint with the rest. Certain things he disapproves: not merely disapproves, but hates. Other things, and certain aspects of the whole, he approves: not merely approves, but loves. There are, therefore, attractions and repulsions in the state, and these, far more than any reasoning of his about the state, will determine his ideal. A man’s ideal in patriotism — his ideal of that which he himself sees when he says, “My country ” — is very far indeed from being an affair of the intellect alone. It is compact of aspiration and desire.

But no other man’s conception of the state, of society, no other man’s vision and outlook, is ever quite the same; nor is there, in any other man, quite the same set of desires and aspirations that have to do with the state. The falling short of one’s ideal is, therefore, inevitable; but loyalty to one’s ideal is possible, and a persistent willing and striving toward it. What is that which in one man keeps alive his whole desire, his undiminished aspiration, while in another man, after a brief struggle, a faint beating of its wings, it yields to necessity, to circumstance?

Edmund Burke, I fancy, will serve us best for an instance of what I mean in patriotism. The warfare between his selfish interests and his attachments, many of them high and tender, on the one hand, and what, for want of a better word, we may call his ideal, on the other, is revealed in his writings and speeches as similar inner conflicts seldom are; for of all great writers and speakers of the English tongue who have also been statesmen, no other, I think, has ever made so plain to us both his inner vision and reflection of society and his purposes, desires, and aspirations for society. Now Burke’s ideal of the state was, unquestionably, more like Choate’s than Garrison’s. His disposition was hopeful, even sanguine. His favorite conceptions, though sublime, were not ethereal. The order of things physical and the harmony of the actual universe were pleasing to him. Adjustments did not seem to him shameful. On the contrary, compromise, arrangement, correlation, entered largely into his scheme. He could contemplate with enthusiasm an empire of checks and balances, of liberty and law, of force and restraint. That all should be practical was thus of the essence of his ideal.

But if his ideal was an ideal of compromise, no man ever had a loftier scorn of any compromise with his ideal. Do but consider his course in the two great crises of his times, — when America broke with the Empire, and when France broke with the past. It is plain that Burke saw, throughout the whole controversy with America, authority enlarging itself at the expense of liberty, — pressing in, as it were, upon the sphere and function of liberty in his ideal scheme of the Empire. And how he pleaded the cause of liberty thus outraged ! With what an intimate sense of it as principle and as impulse he pursued it through the history of the Colonies! No man could speak as he spoke from a mere conviction. A thing he loved had been endangered. It was as if time and change had set upon some landscape familiar to his eyes from boyhood, and threatened to alter it beyond his recognition. When the ministry, with a weak obstinacy, would have struck down the free spirit of a new continent, it struck at something that was vital and sensitive in Burke’s own nature. It was at bottom a sort of selfassertion, an instinct of self-preservation, that made him turn upon authority as he did. It was a lifting of his own head, a deep and passionate breathing in of the boon air about him, — this splendid loyalty to liberty endangered, when in truth liberty was not, to him, the one central and vital principle of society.

On the contrary, it was in essence the same self-assertion which he made when the revolutionists of France, through a riotous over-growth and overreaching of liberty, endangered what was equally dear to him in his ideal of the social order. His opulent imagination had decked authority with the richest trappings, graced it with noble attitudes and poses, and softened its harsh outlines with a tender reverence. Royalty was to him no mere utilitarian device, adapted to a particular function in the state; it was the outgrowth, and the right symbolical expression, of a deep and noble human instinct. If one said, “The King,” Burke saw, with a vision denied to most of us, the long procession of the monarchs of mankind: rich, barbaric Eastern pageants of enthronement ; gestures of command, and high, serious faces of authority; arms of power outstretched with dooms or mercies ; sweet and moving episodes of princely gentleness, and of all our common sorrows worn, in proud silence, like a hair shirt underneath the purple. He saw the peoples of the earth, through all the centuries, turning again and again, from whatever hard adventures of facing life unruled, to lean upon authority and to fortify themselves with thrones and coronations. All this, and more, was passionate in his deep contempt and his hurt anger at the ignorant, impious assault of France on his ideal. A regicide peace with France was to him what an unjust war with America had been. It was a marring and distortion of that image of society which he wore upon his heart.

So much is clear, I think, from what Burke wrote and spoke. The like is only less clear in the utterances and in the lives of other men who have had a truly passionate feeling for the state, for society. Such men are better known to us, perhaps, than any other class. It may be well, therefore, if we keep this particular class of men in mind, and those ideals which grow in us from our membership in communities, while we attempt some further insight into the nature of that in the human spirit which fights with compromise.

We must, I think, take account of something deeper and more hidden than the ideal itself. The question is not of what that may happen to be, but of adherence to it, — of the kind and degree of loyalty. In every case of change in the social order, for example, we are moderate or extreme according to the readiness with which we yield to necessity, or to some less imperative consideration, any part of our ideal. All such changes are, in fact, of the nature of a victory either of liberty over authority or of authority over liberty; and the conflict inside of us may be set forth in the same terms, though the analogy will not be easy to hold. It is, one might say, the voice of authority, at once menacing and protecting, which commends to us accommodation, moderation, acquiescence. It is the voice of the dreadful spirit of Liberty that whips our spirits into defiance. There is a question of monarchy or democracy in our inner state. These citizen desires and aspirations of ours, — wildeyed, fierce denizens of our spiritual Rue Saint Antoines, pale, visionary enthusiasts of the Latin Quarters of our souls, — shall we repress and feed them, or shall we give them rein to triumph — and to starve ? These dear, childlike impulses, —shall we loose them for their play, or shall we house and guard them with a wise and paternal discretion? For a man’s desires are indeed as the very children of his soul, and he loves them with a parent’s love. Compromise, I think, is a sort of bourgeois paternalism of one’s aspirations, careful of health and food, frankly concerned with the welfare of the offspring; while the other sort of fatherhood is more concerned with the high nature and the noble function of its princeling brood. Thus one man will, as it were, coarsen or cheapen his soul’s appetites to that they feed on, — mercifully restrain them, and hold them back from the joust with circumstance; while another man will let them hunger, even to a death in the desert, if heaven send not down the manna which they crave. He will not leash them or hold them back, but, with a kinglier love, bids them forth to the wars.

But these analogies, for all I know, may make rather for confusion than for clearness. My own conception is not of a quality and habit of certain natures and of an unlike quality and habit of other natures. It is, rather, of a force, a power, — a veritable thing, — in all of us, which dwells in the deeps beneath our consciousness, whence in some of us it rises up often, and exercises a well-nigh constant dominance, while in others it comes up seldom, or is so foundered with the bread of compromise, so couched and cushioned with the ease of acquiescence, that it lies in a sleep or torpor, and only now and then stirs and mutters in its sleep. Until it appears, it is undiscernible. While it is silent, the man is altogether amenable to reason, pliant to circumstance. But when it rises up, out of the nothingness within, the man will know it for his very inmost self. Ideal is not its name, for ideals are many, and they change; the thing I mean is one and constant. It is, rather, the champion and tutelary god of all ideals. Nor is it aspiration, but rather the monitor that bids us always aspire, and largely. Nor is it desire, but rather a royal parent to desires. There is, in fact, no name for the thing I mean. Let us call it merely the foe — the hidden foe — of compromise.

Definition and description are inadequate, impossible. To attain any distinct sense of the thing I mean, each of us must endeavor to recall for himself its appearances in his inner life. But the common affair, and a man’s share in the life of a community, though it serve for clearness in illustration, is no doubt too small a part of all but a very few individual lives to afford, for most of us, any very vivid and memorable instances of the rising up within ourselves of this concealed and dreadful power. We must turn, rather, to those experiences in which we singly face the universe without; and each of us must determine for himself what its part has been in his own struggle for the things which should satisfy his primal wants and give him peace.

Now the strife for bread, so one might think, is but a poor occasion for any stirring of the foe of compromise. Nevertheless, it is not always unmindful even of that aspiration. It will teach a man, only too clearly, before he is far progressed along the road to comfort and to luxury, that there are infinite degrees of material welfare, and grades and hierarchies of our merely physical appetites. That characteristic American boast of having or of buying always “the best ” was made first of things material; of food and drink, of shelter, and of raiment. Keen and even sordid money-getters though we are, extravagance is, none the less, a national characteristic. Quite probably, there are more of us who decline to regulate and moderate our appetency for the good things of the physical life from economy, or from temperance, or from any other of the considerations that make for moderate living, than there are in any other country; and doubtless compromise is oftener scorned among us in this than in any other connection. The kingly aspiration of the democrat is least often restrained when the question is of the food that is fit for a king, of purple and fine linen, of chariots and horses. To live thus magnificently with the body, or, obeying the next whole impulse, to disregard the body altogether, as a thing shamed by its ignoble food and housing, — these are the two extremes.

In such concerns, the foe of compromise contradicts the proverbs. “No bread is better than half a loaf ” is its exhortation concerning the immediate wants of the body. “Either riches or poverty ” is its word to our hunger of possession. Nor is its lordship of our natures in respect of these material desires an entirely low sort of dominance, or the mere household drudgery of its kingship. There is a nobleness of the flesh, a fineness of the clay, which is little short of essential to any constant habit of nobleness or fineness in men’s natures. A whole and integral character is, I think, impossible, without a fit incarnation. Fullness and freedom even in spiritual experiences are unattainable without a free access to the life of nature and a full relish of all bodily delights. Here, especially, — though elsewhere it is not less true, — the real nature of the foe of compromise may be intimated best by calling to mind the attitude, in certain moods, of that rare type we call a gentleman: “fine gentleman ” were perhaps the better term in this connection. I mean the sort of human being who never questions his right to the earth and its fullness, and whose right, for that reason, may even go unchallenged by other men. Such a man will choke on common food. He is athirst if he drink not of the best vintage; cabined anywhere but in a palace ; naked, if his raiment be not of the costliest stuffs. For all his senses he will demand always “the best; ” that denied, he will rather bear an utter abstinence than stoop to any landlord’s, tailor’s, tapster’s makeshift for his comfort. Your true “fine gentleman,” if he be shut out from the palace and the king’s table, will oftener be found, like Lear, on the storm-swept moor than in the ale-house.

The immanence and the power of the foe of compromise will thus be plain to many of us if we go no deeper into our inner experience than to take account of our struggle for material things, — our graspings and renunciations. But the part it plays is more important, its power is greater, when the question is of a man’s work.

Now I think that as a matter of fact a man’s ideal of work grows in his breast as Burke’s ideal of society, of the social order, grew in him. There is in every man a reflection of life, a vision and a sense of life, which he has got from observation and experience. It is not constant, but grows and changes ; and it is never quite the same in any two human beings. There is also in every man an inner vision and sense of himself in the midst of life ; of himself projected into life; of his single energy transforming somewhat, or conserving somewhat, of that he sees. The ideal of life is due to the attractions and repulsions of life as he sees it. The ideal of work is a part of the ideal of life. Neither is the result of conscious reasoning or willing. They are thrust up from deeps the reason never sounded. They summon from a height the will has never mounted.

Of necessity, the ideal of work is unattainable. Save in very rare and fortunate cases, it will not be straitened by any restraining sense of the limitations of one’s strength, or correspond at all to one’s actual talents and endowments. It will seldom, in any case, fall short of dignity and grace and power. Quite probably, it has taken its shape from the accidental direction of the man’s first curiosity concerning life, or from the figures of men, enlarged to the eyes of inexperience, which chance may have erected on his earliest horizons. The hue and color of it may be traceable to the atmosphere of his childhood; very likely, it will have a general character of achievement or of sacrifice according to the preponderance of lights or of shadows on the landscape of his youth. In all cases, however, and at all times, it will relate itself to all of life he sees. That he should ever realize it, in any of its stages of growth and change, is, of course, inconceivable.

One might almost say that the degree of success which a man has in his work, considered thus as a striving toward a right place and a full share in life, is the measure of his facility in compromise. What is said of modern as contrasted with ancient art — that it can only suggest, and never can realize or achieve — is true of all uncompromising work. When work can be measured at all with reasonable tests and standards, there has been concession and surrender. The demon within has slept. Nor is it any more true in this than in any other connection that the tender of compromise is ever made once for all. That notion of a crisis which once for all determines a man’s career, and puts an end to hesitating and debating, is a creation of the dramatic instinct. Storytellers and playwrights have so constantly resorted to the fancy that it is become a habit of our thought, but experience is forever belying it. Crises, no doubt, there are; as when, in his youth, a man may sometimes choose, with a reasonable forecast of the future, what particular training or apprenticeship he will undergo, and thereby effectively resolve to keep a certain sort of career possible and forego entirely all other sorts. But the struggle toward his ideal is visible rather in the varying quality of his work than in any choice of tasks. And the struggle, if he do not yield, will be constant, and it will grow ever more desperate.

For the sense of his littleness and weakness will grow upon him day by day; and day by day life will enlarge in his vision of it. The impossibility of his ideal will be more and more manifest. The ideal itself, if he do not, by some positive effort, keep it clear, will grow fainter and fainter. He will also understand better what he foregoes pursuing it, as experience and the widening reach of his observation make him more and more aware, as by the lifting of a mist, of what there is to be won from life by acquiescence and arrangement. The lessening years before him will admonish him to an economy of his energy, and sharpen his desires with fear. Striving toward an ideal, however it may, in point of fact, enisle and separate him from the actual life about him, means, for the man himself, an ever keener sense, an ever wider vision, of the entire front of things without. He is inevitably set upon the aspiration to completeness. He must — so the relentless power within commands him — he must forever strain himself to see and sense life whole.

What that straining is to see and sense the whole of life none know, I think, but they that have this devil. Such have been the men — the Amiels and Obermanns — who have withdrawn from life to the very end of seeing it entire. There is, indeed, a trick, like the trick of wine, to do this without pain: to make even of a wide vision and keen sense of life a soothing entertainment of the soul. This is that leaning and loafing which Walt Whitman loved. It is, perhaps, merely the saying to one’s self that seeing is having, as when a child, by the easy largess of its nurse, is made possessor of the moon. But this sort of fireside travel, and society in solitude, and rubbing of one’s hands over a Barmecide feast, is of the essence of compromise. There is, for mortal eyes, no true seeing without hungering and thirsting. For no such placid observation does the demon within a man drive him up to the high place. There are few worse agonies than this of straining to see life whole.

A very common experience may serve to make my meaning clearer, and to show also how constant is the tender of compromise. You have been, let us say, in some distinguished company, where notable men and high-bred women were joined together in some high exercise of intelligence and sympathy ; where the speech was large, and of large things; where noble music, perhaps, and lights, and graceful courtesies, and rich dress and equipage, invested, for a time, the mere ordinary movements and uses of our human bodies with a great and impressive dignity. And thence you pass into some lesser, humbler company, of no extraordinary interest and quite devoid of charm. Now to keep in mind the fine company, the great occasion, the higher and statelier way of living, is longing and regret. It is far more comfortable, and with effort it is possible, to occupy yourself with the lesser company, the lesser interest; to be conscious of that you have in a way to exclude the troublesome thought of that you have not.

That will be the effort, it is the instinct, in every such case, of natures reconciled and wonted to compromise. None of us, in fact, but learns, after a while, how the mind can be its own place. That sort of “philosophy ” is so common that a man can say that he is philosophical, or that he has philosophy, meaning merely that he knows how to decline upon small things and be content with a little share of life, and run no risk of being thought to boast. But there is that in many of us — I think it is in all of us in our youth — which cries us shame for such a venal practice of oblivion. Philosophy, in that use of it, wears, to certain of our moods, ’a mean and commercial aspect; it has a veterinarian quality. The foe of compromise will have none of it, but will forever, while we are in the midst of little things, force our minds back to the great things we have known, and press upon us, in the very hour when we sink down in failure, the agonizing sense of “that obstreperous joy success would bring. ” The measure of its power over any man is not in the strength of his sword-arm while he fights. It is, rather, in the silent answer he makes with his eyes to such as remind him, after the battle, that this or that of honor or of ease is left to him, though the battle, indeed, is lost.

And it is of his lost battles that one must think if he would clearly understand why that longing and straining after life, which is an inevitable experience if a man is set against compromise, is so great a pain. It is, I think, in times of defeat, of deprivation, that a man’s sense of life is keenest and his vision widest. It is longing, and not having, desire, and not fulfillment, hunger, and not repletion, that quickens most his apprehensions. Possession, ease, security, assurance, —these are not the moods in which he is intensely aware of things outside himself. But if he be thrust forth from the house of his toil, barred from the visionary mansion of his hope, and so let loose to wander to and fro on some highway or city street of life, where beggars cry their sores, all that interior comfort he has lost, and all that unhoused misery he encounters, find their right place and perspective in his tingling thought. All the comfortable postulates of our means-and-end existence, all the merciful conventions which screen us from the unpleasant cognizance of naked truths, and the whole habit of assumption, fall away from the vanquished. As no man learns the depth of his own love until some absence or estrangement comes, so only he who feels himself somehow shut out from any right, fit part in the world’s work and play can ever learn how great and dreadful is his own hunger for this life. Only he, and he only if the foe of compromise be strong within him, will ever know the uttermost craving of the flesh, or the mind’s agony of farthest outreach, or the fierce surging of the heart’s desire.

Stripped of his pride, quickened with his hurt, such a man will bare his quivering soul to life. Suns rise and mount and set in single moments of his hurrying thought; each day he is scornful for wasted hours, that might be charged with high activities or rapturous with keen delights. Nature, with all her vast contrivances of charm, — her grand procession of the seasons; her many musics of loud diapasons and low babblings and clear, sweet trills and birdnotes ; her seas and lands; her cloudy splendors; her glancing lights and shades and darkling closes ; her cold and snowy exaltations, and the warm mother’s breast she keeps for her tired children, — Nature, and this green earth, will mock his famishing senses with the invitations to a myriad feasts. To look upon his kind, absorbed in infinite activities of work and play, in loves and friendships, will be a still more exquisite torture. This man’s pursuit of his desire is the fine, eager coursing of a greyhound; that other’s is the lithe bound of a tiger on his prey. All ways he looks are shapes of power and energy addressed to hope. Men and women, in all their meetings and partings, with their sure tones, their lit looks of understanding, their trembling lips of tenderness, tantalize him with some secret, some trick of living, which he has not mastered. Tired mothers, bending to their constant household mercies, and the hands of little children, — ever, with their tiny fingers and ringed, threadlike joints, life’s tenderest appeal to a man’s fainting heart,— these, most of all, will shame him with the sense that life, human life, escapes him. This is the pain of him who fails, and slinks, like a wounded beast, away from his fellows. It is in store for every man who will not compromise.

For no man, however hurt and shamed and beaten, however curst, will bear this agony of the vision and the sense of life if his spirit be not ruled by the foe of compromise. Escape is easy. He could learn “philosophy” if he would; and there are for all but a very, very few men opportunities of duty and sacrifice. Even Clough, who, perhaps, has already come into the reader’s thought, — Clough, who by reason of his frank confession of his longing and weak tenderness for this earthly, human life, has a fine distinction among those who have scorned most the insulting terms on which they are permitted to live,— even Clough had clearly seen, had justly weighed, not merely the reason and necessity, but also the moral commendations, of acquiescence and arrangement .

Yes, and there’s duty in it, too: —

And for what higher mandate does he disobey the iron law? With what finer voice does he confute the voice of a conscience instructed by all human experience ? His argument is nothing but a “maybe: ” —

It is, in truth, from no self-deceit that natures such as Clough’s revolt at common sense and scorn all practical moralities. Sooner or later, the path which such men tread brings them to a point whence they can clearly see the goal of all their wandering. And it is no Round Tower of mysterious compensations. It is, rather, the very Castle of Despair.

That way this hard path leads. The scorn of low contents, the putting by of the ease of oblivion, the resolute facing out of all the black and slinking horrors of the night-time,—these wrestlings are but preliminary exercises to the true encounter. They are all, in the last analysis, mere subordinations of the lesser to the greater hope, the meaner to the nobler aspiration. But to put by all hope, all aspiration, all desire, to “reason with the worst that may befall,” to consider simply and sincerely that a cold negative is the right, true answer to the long, fond questioning of life, — even so far a man will come. What but a demon in his breast could bring him to that pass ? What in any sense natural impulse or instinct could bring him to do this, — this, which one man will do, in the dark night, starting and sweating with his fear, while another man, far more courageous, perhaps, in all ordinary ways, shakes off the hideous thought and wills himself to sleep!

But this experience is harder to convey than any other I have touched upon. All our conceptions of failure, of giving up, are in fact so softened with the idea of compensation, hope is a habit into which we so unconsciously fall from the mere fact of living, that there is to most of us no vaguer word than despair. To realize it, a man must, I think, be brought somehow into the state in which beaten men sense the things they have desired. He must be as Lear was on the moor; as the blind Œdipus was when he took leave of his children; as Othello was, his power in Cyprus gone, the willow-song of his slain Desdemona in his ears; as Hamlet was when his lips, which trembled with tender love, were twisted with the maniac grin and the foul words that drove Ophelia from his side. But even then — even in such case as these were in — circumstance and fate are not enough to work despair. It is no mere response of reason to events. It is not an intellectual experience. It is, in the actual sense of it, a sort of turning of the parent soul upon its offspring; a strangling and a trampling down of all desires; the ghastly infanticide of a thousand hopes and longings.

For these will live, in spite of circumstance, if only they escape the Herod in a man’s own breast. They will live on in the foulest dungeon; in the sordidest poverty; in the deepest shame. Though they be caverned from the light of day, they will still live, and suck their sustenance from whatever noxious growths, whatever dark, forbidden roots of things, they find protruding from their cavern walls, — roots, maybe, of the flowers and the great, green trees above. Circumstance alone will never make a tragedy. Catastrophe is tragical only when it strikes a Lear, an Œdipus. The true tragedy is in the men themselves, — in the stern thrusting off of mercy, and tearing loose the bandage, and turning of the face to the wall. It is that in them, not fate or circumstance, which awes us in the presence of these souls.

But it is not, I think, in the respect of a man’s work, in his straining after life, or even in his fronting of despair, which are, nevertheless, unavoidable experiences if the foe of compromise dominates his nature, that its utmost power is exhibited. These are hard and cruel tyrannies, but the demon is more ruthless still. For compromise, though it be intrenched in a complete circle and circumvallation, and able to strike at will from without, and though it be enabled also, through countless disaffections of desire and reason, to intrigue within, will never find its supreme opportunity until all desires shall be fused in overmastering passion, and all the myriad calls and challenges of life shall mingle in a single poignant and delirious appeal. The opportunity of compromise the besieger will be supreme only when, upon the ears that strain at the tumult and the silence, the mating note shall fall; when, before the eyes that weary with their long gaze into the mysteries, the woman’s form shall pass. Strifes of the day and terrors of the night, — through these a man may go, and keep his faith in unfaith. For with these a man may fight; things or shadows, they are foes to fight with. But how shall a man fight with the woman ? And never came a woman yet but as the emissary, the ardent or unwitting advocate, of compromise. Never but by compromise were two lives joined together, or a child born into the world. The same fell thing within a man which turns his bread into ashes, and makes his work and play like the gasping and the sinking knees of a nightmare dream, will likewise turn his love into a whipping with scorpions, and a bath in fiery whirlwinds.

For the ideal, which was before of life, and of a right, full share in life, is now of a thing quite as clearly unattainable. It is the vision and the dream of sharing all life with another nature. The ideal is of sympathy: of the perfect knowledge and sure sentience of another human soul.

And now, no doubt, I come to that in a man’s life which it is hardest to invade with reasonable prose speech. Here, that speech is most convincing which has the most of passion in it. Even that other agony of straining after the whole of life is oftenest set forth, and best set forth, with the suggestive imagery, the passionate music of verse. There is no prose Prometheus. But even in the poetry of protest that is the most nearly intellectual — in certain of the speeches of the heroes of great tragedies, in Omar, in Byron, in Clough — there is seldom to be found anything beyond a setting forth, an expression, of the tragical in life and in the human spirit. Moved with great pity and great horror, we are more likely merely to fall wondering and weeping than to reflect, with any coherency, concerning the cause, or the real nature, of all that woe we read of. If we would bring ourselves to any clear-eyed comprehension of the utmost human wretchedness, if we would try to understand how supreme pain comes into the lives of men, our speech and our thought must be in prose. It comes, I believe, only when circumstance besets a nature dominated by this power which we may call, in a very real sense, unnatural, since it seems so flatly to contradict the natural order and break in upon the “harmony of the universe. ”

For if, to draw near the greater experience through the less, we speak first of friendship, it is not hard to see why the ideal of sympathy can never be realized. The impossibility does not lie essentially in that imperfection of our knowledge of other natures which comes of the imperfection of our means of communication. It is true, of course, that no human being ever had a perfect knowledge of another nature. Eye and ear and sense, however they have pierced and penetrated, have never once surmounted altogether the wall of flesh. But our separation one from another is not the main fact. The main fact is our strangeness one to another,— our real difference and unlikeness.

The impossibility of the ideal lies essentially in this: that no two natures can ever have the same vision or reflection and the same sense of life. Pass but an inch beyond courtesy and the conventions, and you encounter, in whatever human being you press into, a contrariety of impulse and of motive which reveals him little short of your antipodes. Life, which engulfs you both, is to him one element, to you another. Another sun, and other stars, are over him from his birth, and shed their strange rays on another world. Like they are, these worlds, and you can, with a certain comprehension, observe and study his. But you can never pass from yours to live in his, nor can he, crossing “ the step or two of dubious twilight,” ever once set foot on yours. It is not, therefore, the imperfection of speech and the false witness of conduct that set the bounds to friendship. Notwithstanding these, a merely intellectual companionship will sometimes come very near to completeness. On the contrary, it is often true, I think, that the more knowledge a man gets of his friend through speech and conduct, the more clearly he perceives that they are irrevocably sundered. No doubt, if both be reconciled to compromise, they are in better case by reason of the better knowledge each has of the other’s nature: a modus vivendi is easier to find and to observe. But the aspiration which we mean when we speak of an ideal of friendship has nothing to do with any makeshift modus vivendi. And by a modus vivendi I do not mean merely the sort of arrangement, of the nature of a commercial convention, which is frequently called friendship. Through that relation, though no tariff of thanks and apologies be kept up, nothing higher than a reciprocity of good offices will ever be attained. But even where a genuine affection exists, and begets faith, each nature, though the two be bound together by the noblest conceivable alliance, is still as a foreign kingdom to the other.

If, therefore, compromise be not accepted on both sides, friendships are bitter things; bitterest and cruelest when on one side there is the instinct and the leading of compromise, and on the other side a blind loyalty to the ideal. For that same power which, if it be enthroned in any man, will play the Herod with his other longings, will likewise make a horrid murder of this strong and tender longing to be companioned. The proof of a rigid adherence to the ideal in friendship is not good-nature, forbearance, moderation. And yet these are necessary. It is necessary to adhere to one’s own orbit, never disarranging the solar system of society by a mad plunging through the estranging voids. But the man possessed of the demon will forever strive to get through the voids. In the actual experience, the space which divides him from the heart of his friend will seem no greater than that between the level of actual speech and conduct and the hidden level of impulse and motive which always underlies them. To reach that hidden source of speech and conduct, to know and share the true inner life behind the mask, below the deed, is the constant, tortured longing of an uncompromising friendship. But to the other sort of friendship such invasions will seem hostile; they will incur a forfeiture of the alliance. When two human beings so address themselves to each other, the hurts they give and take are grievous; they could scarcely do each other worse hurts if they were mortal foes. Judged by all our reasonable standards of obligation, he of the ideal, he of the too great yearning for the heart of his friend, will be guilty of that friendship’s death.

But there is a still more dreadful tyranny of the strange power inside of us. Not content with the murder of friendships, it will drive a man on to slay his love. There are men who will not, even for the highest prize of all, consent to compromise; who will not yield even to the most exquisite of all persuasions from self-torture to selfsacrifice,— not even to that voice which is in truth the voice of every ardent and imperious desire, every longing, every hope and aspiration, in a man’s own heart of heart. For it is all that, and more, in every man that is not wholly intellectual or brutish. No tribe or people ever set up a Victory that did not wear a woman’s shape. No man ever had an ideal of love that did not relate itself to everything in his whole vision of life, or ever drew near to an adventure of it, through the profoundest of all human relations, without a truly awful sense of recognition, of the ending of a lifelong quest.

If we should try to see how this ideal grows in a man, as we have tried to do with the others, we should have to go back to the very beginnings of his sentience and intelligence. It is not surprising that many, striving to account for it, have been driven to the theory of an earlier existence and a transmigration of souls, so unearthly is the prescience and presentience which it brings. There was never a truer story of an ideal love than Mr. Kipling’s Brushwood Boy. No other experience, certainly, has so bewildering an effect of the realization of a dream as this has; and it is clear that the dream begins very near indeed to the hither bound of life. The need of sympathy, that is to say, the craving to share with some other human soul the vision and the sense of life, is in every one of us far older than the “natural” or the reasoned need of mates and helpmeets, and it long outlasts them. The crying out of a child in the dark is, no doubt, the beginning of the quest and wandering.

The natural need, the reasoned need a man can satisfy, can satiate; for these, from their very nature, belong altogether to the realm of compromise. The laws we make for them, like those of our reasonable friendships, are of the nature of commercial regulations. The morality we invoke is the morality of exchange, of obligation, of compensation. The higher quest is hopeless. But to see how it is hopeless we must have a truer and more vivid conception of sympathy than that we ordinarily have when we use the word; for every instance, every experience we can call to mind falls leagues short of any realization of perfect sympathy. We speak of perfect sympathy and perfect faith as though they could be felt and known together; but if sympathy were perfect there would be no place for faith. It is never perfect, because no two human beings ever have in themselves the same vision and reflection and the same sense of life. Even when, like the gentler flow of friendship, the master passion breaks upon the reefs of the dividing Darien, its great tides will indeed beset them with an onslaught far more powerful and thunderous, but not less vain. Never once will the two oceans mingle ; never once will their estranged waters move with the same currents to and fro beneath the stars. Nor is it the intervening solid lands that make the true estrangement. The vexed Atlantic surface of one human sold could not, were there no continent between, obey with its undulations the mild, pale moon of the Pacific. No flame of passion ever fused, no sacrament ever truly joined together, no long wandering, hand in hand, through days and years, through joys and sorrows, ever cemented, into a real union and oneness, two differing natures. A man will as soon accomplish that other demoniac task of compassing and pervading the whole of life as this of breaking through the barriers of the flesh, and then, with one great roar and plunge, or silent mingling of the waters, compassing and pervading the soul of the woman on his bosom.

And the demon, if he hold the man to this, the cruelest of all the tasks he sets him, will make of him a murderer once more. I say, of him: for convention, and the habit of constraint which comes of weakness, and the powerful and noble instinct of motherhood, itself the very mother of all sacrifice, — these things mercifully forbid that the foe of compromise shall rule in women’s natures. All their training is in arrangement and adjustment, and their strength is faith. They are turned back, by all the conditions of their existence, from quests and questionings. We have, indeed, in the self-revelations of the unfortunate Marie Bashkirtseff and a few others, the proof that this usual and merciful atrophy of the tragical impulse has not always been accomplished. But with the rarest exceptions women are not merely without it themselves, they cannot at all understand it when they find it in a man. They can only fall to praying, with poor Ophelia,—

Save that they conform to the artistic necessity of crises, the two plays, Hamlet and Othello, illustrate as faithfully as any true experience could, and far more vividly, the devastation which uncompromising love may make. Ophelia crazed and Desdemona murdered, — these hideous consequences are not the work of circumstance, of fate, alone, but equally of that which ruled alike in the breast of the Moor and of the Dane. For these two well-nigh perfect women, these high-natured men, were surely dowered with all that ever yet has entered into human love to make it glorious. Beauty and faith and tenderness these women had to give; Hamlet, the refined, Othello, the elemental, were of a fineness and capacity to match such largess as life brought them. Both were by these voices called from dreary wanderings : one, from his soldier’s hard and ill-paid service; the other, from his worse combats with the powers within, — from that straining at life and fronting of despair which even Shakespeare, speaking with his voice, could only vaguely shadow forth in words. What, indeed, could be more contrary to all nature and all reason and all right than that such men as these were, served as they were served, so drawn, so impelled, should bend so readily to doubt and question ? Sacrifice, rather than desire, was no doubt, in the last analysis, the true deterrent motive with them both; for both were noble. But a too close analysis would lose for us the whole and simple horror of their deeds. The main thing is, that we ourselves cannot look upon the havoc these men made of love, of their own lives, of the lives of these helpless, trustful women, without a strange response, somewhere in our own deeps, to that which speaks in the bloody passion of Othello, in the coarse jibes of the sensitive Hamlet. If we seek out the kinship between them, the kinship among all tragical natures, we find it, I think, in this: that at every turn, at every fork, they take, and must take, whatever course is least like acquiescence in whatever incompleteness. They cannot learn the trick which through the constant repetition is become the habit of our lives, — the trick which overthrows and puts to sleep the demon of remorseless search and question.

But few indeed, even of the illstarred brotherhood of them that cannot acquiesce, will ever run in this superb and awful way upon the sudden, sharp point of disaster. Crises are no more characteristic of this than of any other actual experience. Where love has once sprung to life in a day, it has a thousand times grown, with a slow palpitation, to its full, regal power. Where it has once met with quick catastrophe, it has a thousand times lived on through long years of an unspeakable pain. This, of course, I mean only of the higher sort of love; for that, if it ever truly live at all, will long outlive the fury of our youth. It is, indeed, the thing by which men live themselves, if life be not the aridest of promenades; the one true glory and radiance to be found on this earth; the thing which is clearly the most unearthly of all, — save, perchance, this other monstrous thing I write of; the thing of which one sometimes catches a shining trace, like the trace of stars, in the swift meeting of the eyes of such as through the years and the sorrows have walked together, side by side, when some old memory stirs. That, I think, all but the lowest men will say, is the best of this earthly life; and all experience teaches that it can never be won but by infinite persistence in acceptance and in faith. Yet there are real men, and men, too, of natures as sensitive as the unreal Hamlet’s, as noble as Othello’s, who will put aside even that cup from their lips, and say to fate, to circumstance: “Look you, I know this vintage, and my soul ’s athirst. For I have wandered to and fro through all this human life — through work, through play; tasted its pleasures; borne its bitter sorrows. I am a man, with all desires, all longings, of mankind; and this, I know, is best. But I will not buy, with lying and hypocrisy, a venal faith, even this, my heart’s desire. No, not even for this will I sell my own soul, though I sell it into bliss.”

And yet, —

There needs but a shutting of the eyes to somewhat, an opening of the eyes to somewhat else; but a trick of the will, and it is regnant; a turn of the wrist, a twist of the knee, and the wrestle with the demon is won. The next fall will be easier, and the next. At last, he sleeps; and life is ours once more to fight for, to enjoy. Bread is sweet upon the tongue; work is a noble warfare ; and the charmed cup of love and sacrifice will never once run dry.

And is there, then, no word to say of any compensation for the havoc which the demon makes ? It would, I fear, be wrong, unwise, even to hint at any good the foe of compromise brings to our humanity which it so cruelly outrages. Certainly, there is little we can note of its victims, of such as we perceive to be subject to its power, — little, indeed, in them or in their lives, — that moves us to condone its rule. We do, as I have said, pay to such men a deep, involuntary homage of wonder and of awe when they come before us in the crises of great tragedies, and whenever they appear in history. But there is an artistic necessity, like the other necessity of crises, to endow the heroes of tragedy with a natural, simple heroism beside this extraordinary and unnatural heroism — if heroism be a right word for it — which makes them tragical. In history, likewise,it is only by reason of exceptional endowment, or by the accident of birth, that such men ever mount high enough, whether it be on thrones or funeral pyres, to draw our gaze across the centuries. It is not reason, but a prompting of that very hidden thing itself, which at this instant turns our minds upon some thought of the superb, vaguely triumphant leading of forlorn hopes and dying in last ditches. Turn, rather, from the Savonarolas and the Hamlets, to the pinched faces, the bowed forms, the stumbling gait, of such as you yourself will know to be of that strange band; and though there be indeed some little stirring in you of the awe of tragedy, you will shrink back from their companionship. Strong men, bearing visible burdens of duty and of help, scorn them for dastards and for shirks. Women, though they begin with them in pity, end in despair, or in contempt and weariness. Children do not come about their knees. There is no test or standard of excellence known to our ordinary thought by which they are approved; for out of their desolation no light or cheer comes into other lives.

If there be indeed any compensation, it must lie in this: that these ghastly lives, spent in the disregard of all that the long experience of mankind can teach concerning the way to live best in this world, in seeking peace through warfare, and truth through denial, and faith through unfaith, and love in the scorn of all our fond, weak practices of loving, — that these lives must proceed out of something in us which did not come into us out of any former lives on this earth, or out of this earthly order which we live in now. If, after the fashion of compromise, we would make the best of that in us which wars with it, we might lay hold, for our own midnight hours of wrestling, of a certain vague renewal of hope and faith which sometimes, with an irresistible resurrection, swells in these tortured breasts: a hope, a faith, that we are also parts of another order, — unseen, vast, and free; that we are meant to break through barriers; meant to eat of the right heavenly manna, and to work with sure hands, and to see with an unclouded vision, and to love with a fearless love; that there is indeed some other peace than the peace of compromise, the peace of acquiescence.

But to no such word of compensation will they hearken who are set upon this stony way. Tired, aimless wanderers through whatever wastes, lank, pale anchorites of whatever desert caves, torn combatants in whatever battlings of the spirit, wailing pursuers of whatever other human souls, they welcome no comfort, seek no heartening. Save to some other of their own brotherhood, their speech is scarce intelligible. Accost, with any pitying remonstrance, a member of this band, and he will answer back, with wavering and uncertain voice, with eyes astrain: “This way I live; I can no other. This way I face this life I did not seek, this mystery I cannot solve, these shadowy forms of things I cannot grasp. This way I work. This way I love. This way I fight for peace. This way I grope for God.”

William Garrott Brown.