The porch has arms that reach right out, And the knocker seems to talk. At twilight, when I hurry home, THE FEAR OF LIFE AND ITS EVIL EFFECTS HE paradox of living which never knows life is not a TH new one in the story of man's wrestle with that "spangle of existence" allotted him here. Of late, however, the voice, without both temple and tavern, cries more insistently against the loss entailed by the closed door and man's complicity in it. You know how little while we have to stay, was the ancient appeal for the opened door, and now a growing murmur against mortal cowardice that dares not force the lock is in all the air. "You are the dreams we do not dare to dream" is the gentle challenge of the poet, and a nation "afraid of life" is the bold charge of the critic, where the last chance to taste of life in all its freedom and fullness has been offered mankind. With no more worlds to conquer, it is sad to read that Americans have missed their opportunity and through a "fear of life" involved themselves and their literature in a "labyrinth of gentle fancy, of wan emotion, of love without passion and faith without rapture." Especially sad, too, when some at least of their literary forefathers certainly started them out in the right path. Was it not “the primitive and enduring" that appealed to Thoreau, when he said: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, I wanted to live Was it not life to front only the essential facts of life. deep and suck out all the marrow of life." in its very essence that Emerson considered when he said if man "plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come around to him.” Alas, when did American instincts grow too tame and domestic for any large world of life or literature to come round to them? For this you will note, far more than the cry of commercialism, is the sin against genius and force which the subtler critics lay at their door. The loss of "primal passions" in the free and primal atmosphere of a new world is something for which the children of light and literature find it hard to forgive them. To talk of "the stainless integrity of their private lives" in the face of tameness in their literature is more than pathetic and amusing to the elect of letters. It is like seeing a star go out in a new heaven prepared for it, and a tallow dip of modest home construction take the place of it. Naturally enough Puritanism, with its narrow creeds and forms and innumerable proprieties and, above all, its "New England conscience" was held largely responsible for it. For the majority of these broader critics appear to think, with Stevenson, that "the person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to some degree of humbug and the sense of law in their members precipitates them toward a frozen and affected bearing." The utmost "abandon of life" is the point insisted upon and that our greatest genius in fiction, Nathaniel Hawthorne, used the conscience motto for his intense and unparalleled probing at the heart of life is a phenomenon before which they confess themselves wrapped in wonder. Some Villon of the plains, some Balzac to record "the passion of a desert" is what they demand and, lacking this, even Whitman, with his bold dash at the underside of things and yearning for "the unanchored and driving free" did not lift us above the fear of life into the atmosphere of the immortals. The new world inheritance that brought neither a new pantheism nor a new pain to interpret or augment the still sad music of humanity, nor yet a life free as the wild birds to defy all pain or fear, seemed a wasted splendor, a lost chance to recover for man the universal spirit, the universal joy. That Thoreau declared nature herself "vast, drear and inhuman," not to be associated with man in any Wordsworthian sympathy or tenderness, does not preclude the idea that somehow in the unprofaned deeps of the primeval forest or the vast solitude of the hills the American man should have come upon the "hidden deity" of elemental life who would relieve him of all his fears, and above all of his pestiferous conscience. That instead man settled down to puritan prayer meetings, blue laws and patient psalms of life is something for which the bohemian soul of genius and art can scarcely forgive him. And yet there may still be hope for him. If abandon to desire and defiance of troublesome laws lead the way to native force and passion a veritable Olympus may soon be set up in our midst. The only trouble is that by all the laws of art genius must know the way from the pit to the Empyrean, and a majority of those who go down to test the tartarean shivers lose themselves in the operation, and thus leave the divine comedy of life but partially revealed to us. No wonder, either, when the very expression "abandon of life" commonly carries with it some sinister idea of lawlessness in darker desires and passions, instead of the pure and enduring joys which ever lie at the heart of life. A lingering vision of the primitive lords of life and liberty faring forth to seize feudal castle or Sabine women as the native impulse seized them, goes still with this high theory of life's abandon. That the essence of life is divine, and the true fearlessness of life grows out of that truth, is something not dwelt upon by the majority of our critics. Yet here is the real potency of their demand for a brave facing of life, to the utmost, in the creature of force or genius, and their charge that a fear of life can pale all the fires of thought, being or achieving in any nation or individual. "Life means intensely and it means good,” said one of the mightiest sons of genius who ever braved the sun and tried the stuff of life through every glint of gold or dross, the highest or the lowest phase of being could bring to it, and to fling one's self into the life current with that faith is to welcome the rough water as well as the smooth, and count every human experience worth all it cost―aye, cover the suffering and the sinning that are the eye-openers of the soul. "The unlit lamp and the ungirt loin," are the only deadly forms of fear such vision recognizes. To fear to battle for his soul's desire, his life's set prize, be it what it will, is the coward faltering at the heart of life, which blights and kills. It is not strange, either, that Browning places it in the domain of love, since love he held to be the grand prize of life, though one which mortal cowardice and weakness have most abused and forfeited. To dare to be true to love, when the world and its ways stood at all in the path of it, has apparently been given only to the great ones of the earth, while yet there is nothing surer than That to turn from love is life's one treason There is a place where fear of life does more than impoverish literature and a deeper cry than the artist's might |