"I have been imagining you in Paris," wrote Marie, "having a delightful, bohemian time. My ideas of Paris are all derived from reading Balzac, who has certainly created the most delightful, gay and mysterious, sad, mystic, sordid, everything one could wish in a city of dreams and realities. "When Terry brought me 'Evelyn Innes,' by George Moore, the other day, I dug into it with zeal and delight, and was surprised and pleased with his subtle psychology, during the first part of the story; but psychology can be carried to the point where it becomes incomprehensible, stupefying and monotonous. I finally grew indescribably weary of the problems of Evelyn's soul, but I kept on to the end, and then sank back on my pillow exhausted. I think I shall stop reading for a while, lest I have literary indigestion. I'll try to be satisfied for the time with Swinburne and Shelley. Our anarchistic poet lectured "I have indeed been going to so many 'humanity lectures,' and clubs, such as the Shelley Club, where the divine anarchist B—— misinterprets the great bard every week to his flock of female admirers, and had been reading so much Swinburne and other sublime things that recently I have had a reaction, and there is nothing now at the Salon except Nietzsche. He is a relief, although I feel "Though Nietzsche says some very bitter things about women, who have no place whatever in his scheme of things, except perhaps for the relaxation of the warriors, yet there is something dignified in his very denunciation. His attitude toward our sex is so different from that of Schopenhauer, and many other philosophers. They usually take the 'rag and a bone and a hank of hair' attitude, and are disgusting. But Nietzsche warns men that women are dangerous, and danger, in Nietzsche's philosophy, is a sublime thing. Also, we must become the mothers of his Overmen. "Terry, too, is much interested just now in Nietzsche; quite naturally, for Terry is one of those 'men of resolute indolence' who will not work without delight in his labour. He talks a great deal just now of a plan to seek some cave and there try to become an 'Overman.' I pointed out to him that that was difficult, for to become an Overman he must of course 'keep holy his highest thought,' without being disturbed by the struggle for existence, Marie's moods are many, and in her next letter she wrote in quite a different vein: "I almost wept when reading your letter about the baby. Perhaps it was because of the line, 'A little daughter was born to me.' It recalled to me this Christmas time many years ago when I was a little child and I heard the story of the little Jesus. 'And unto us a child was born.' How those words ring in my ears! So vividly come back to me the pity "But I suppose I must congratulate you on assuming the responsibility of fatherhood for the third time. You might long ago have studied pre-natal influences and the rights of the unborn. I hope you have not neglected these sacred duties. It surprised me that you wished for a girl, for not long ago you expressed the opinion that women were soulless creatures without memory! Suppose your daughter should not be an exception, how would you feel then?... You have been very active. As for me, I fear my only activity will be that of a dreamer. I differ from the dreaming class only in one respect and that is, in making confidences, which dreamers never do. They shrivel up into themselves. They usually create their own sorrows, which have no remedy except the joys they also invent. They are natural only when alone, and talk well only to themselves." In the same letter she plunges into the gossip of the Salon: "I don't blame Scott for his carelessness. The poor fellow has been suffering terribly because of his wife, who has left him and gone off with a new love to a new home. Scott has been quite heroic about it, but he suffers. You know how in our radical society men and women try to deny that they are jealous, try to give freedom to each other. But whatever our ideas may be, we cannot control our fundamental instincts, and poor Scott is now a wounded thing, I can assure you. But he speaks beautifully of his wife—even packed up her things for her and escorted her to the new place. "Scott came here the other night with your friend the journalist, Fiske, who has become quite a part of our little society. I am sorry to say that he is quite sad, too, but for a different reason. The poor fellow seems to be suffering from lack of literary inspirations. He has a habit of asking people what shall he write about. He asks Terry, and even me, and in pity I am trying to write up the old women in our tenement for him.... "I see a good deal of Thompson and his wife Minna. Now that Thompson, who was a famous radical, is more prosperous, he is Marie likes the Jews of the Salon, many of them, very much, but there are some she doesn't, as the following shows: "Things are rather dead in the 'movement,' just now. But there is something doing among the Jewish radicals, who, you know, are very important in any radical movement here in Chicago. No wonder things are lively when the Jews have such a leader as Mr. Kohen, whom one might believe to be the long wanted Messiah, destined to lead his race into the promised land, which is evidently Chicago. There was a hot time about three weeks ago in the Masonic Temple meeting when this "I am going to a ball next Sunday night. It's on the Jewish holiday in memory of the time when poor Moses led the Jews from Egypt and they had to eat unleavened bread. All the orthodox Jews will spend the day praying in the synagogue, without tasting food or drink. They make up for it the next day, though, you bet. The ball is given every year by the radical Jews, usually right in the Ghetto, and nearly always the followers of holy Moses jump on those who no longer follow, and there's a hot time. Last year the radical Jews, mostly anarchists, had to have police protection! The police are good for something, after all! What should we do without them? We would exterminate each other without delay!" Perhaps Marie's temporary "grouch" against the Jews was partly due to the irruption into her Society of three new and attractive Israelites of her own sex—an event happening about that time. In one of these newcomers, Terry, it appears, was somewhat interested, "I must admit that I grow tired at times of the 'movement.' Kate says she has cut it out altogether, and Terry goes to the meetings very seldom. I dutifully attend the lectures, where they talk about the same old things in the same old way, and also the socials and visit the comrades once in a while. But they do get on my nerves sometimes. I prefer to stay at home, in the inner circle of the salon, "Terry has been writing an article on 'the general strike,' but did not finish it. He is like me in lacking energy enough to carry out any plan or purpose unless great pressure is brought to bear upon him either from within or without. I am sure that if he continued to feel strongly about the general strike he would go on to finish it. But he has a great distrust, really, of the 'labour' movement and of labour leaders. He believes that all social improvement must come from the workers, but how many difficulties there are! One of the greatest is the lack of good leaders. I myself have not much hope for the workers as long as they remain sheep who are lost without leaders, are dependent and led either by honest men who know not clearly how, where, or why, or by intelligent men, whose intelligence usually takes the form of trickery and self-interest. The intelligent honest ones seem not to be cut out to be leaders, or successful in any way. Sheep are led or driven most easily by those who can make the most "Perhaps it is a good sign that people from the higher walks of life are beginning to take notice of the workingman's problem, and maybe the ideal leader will come from above, but even so I doubt if that will help much. I have a feeling that all movements dependent on leaders must necessarily fail. Of course, I know that the people of the 'higher life' fear the stupidity and brutality of the mass of workers, and argue that leaders are necessary to guide and restrain them. This is only partly true; there is hardly any doubt about the stupidity of the mob, but they are not at all so brutal. True, during times of strike they will throw stones and slug strike-breakers, but they are not nearly as brutal as the "During the teamsters' strike I witnessed a scene where the strikers hustled the scabs, overturned several huge wagons loaded with beef, in the centre of one of the poorest districts of Chicago, where the people were suffering from want of meat, but the wretches did not even have sense enough to help themselves from this plentiful store which was left on the street guarded only by one or two policemen. And there would have been no danger of arrest, for the policemen could easily have been swept aside by the rest of the mob. It made me mad. I felt like shouting at them, 'you fools, why don't you help yourselves?' How differently a hungry bunch of kids would have acted!" Terry, in his very different way, wrote on the same subject: "I never knew a sincere, not to say honest, labour leader, from business agent up. Poor proletaire! forever crucified between two sets of thieves—one rioting on his rights, the other carousing on his wrongs. Labour This strange master of the "salon," this poetic interpreter of the philosophy of the man who has nothing, has, in spite of his pessimisms, a profound mystic hope. He wrote: "That toiling humanity—the labour movement—to me is a thing so vast, that whatever other movements try to exclude themselves from it, they must be swallowed up in it. All other things are but the shadows cast behind or before the ever-marching phalanx of the unconquerable, the imperishable proletaire. This is the hope which sends its thrill through us when nothing else can. At the bottom of my heart I know I am living but for one thing, and my life has been nothing but a preparation for this. Of and for myself I have accomplished nothing: for to be ever ready and alert is not accomplishment.... I see a profound hope in the proletaire, for to him is granted that intense, wistful awareness of his common lot and life with his fellows. His very crowding in factories "This strange crowding in our consciousness of things that do not seem to come from us and yet are of us—this clamouring consciousness is what drives me to despair and makes me feel I have not the form or shadow of things, though I may have the substance. Yet I am determined to strain my self-consciousness even to the breaking point; for though I know madness lies that way, there stands my Ideal, beckoning. I must grasp this great common thing which comes from "Let me tell you of something that recently happened to me which shows how strong this race feeling is, as opposed to merely individual or family feeling. I heard that my mother was dying. I had become reconciled long ago, had seen many things more clearly; for if joy is of the heart, sorrow is of the soul, by which we see. I wonder if woman has a 'lake' in her heart. I used to think my mother had, and when I called to see her once more, the old love-longing caught me by the throat. My presence seemed to help her some, but, though moved, I had passed beyond the family boundary-line, and was engaged in stripping myself of everything not belonging to the soul. If I wish to be something more than myself, I must be prepared to lose all, even myself. And what is my family and my mother?" Terry does not like to use the word "religion." But he certainly belongs to the type of the religious man. One of the most marked characteristics of the religious temperament is this abandonment of personal and family ties, this indifference and often hostility "There must be some meaning," wrote Terry, "for all this ancient agony. Oh, that I might expand my written words into an Epic of the Slums, into an Iliad of the Proletaire! If an oyster can turn its pain into a pearl, then, verily, when we have suffered enough, something must arise out of our torture—else the world has no meaning. On this theory, all my pangs are still to come. I too will arise out of my sacrificial self and look back on my former bondage in amaze, even as I now look down on the dizzy slums where I am and yet am not! It cannot be that I came up out of the depths for nothing. If I could pierce my heart and write red lines, Terry feels that somehow deep in his life he has been crucified, that society has nailed him to the cross: "I was alone on the cross and with bloodshot, beseeching eyes beheld the world objectively. Yet I was aware of a harmony beyond me, though not in me or around me." It is this "harmony beyond," this religious sense of "something far more deeply interfused" which, ever conscious in the idealist's mind, makes the concrete vision of everyday fact so ugly, leads to anarchism of feeling profound and constant. But in this world, which as a whole the heart rejects—"my heart," said Terry, "is the last analysis of all things"—the idealist sees things of beauty which constitute for him the elements of perfection, elements which in "I saw a fine thing from the window to-day," Terry wrote, "a thing of sheer delight, the complete transfiguration of a human being. An Italian street labourer came into the yard and sprawled on the grass to eat his own lunch. He was bandy-legged from being coaxed to stand alone too soon. But he had a most wonderful face; all the mobility which toil had banished from his form must have sought refuge in his eyes and his caressing countenance. Catching sight of some children playing 'house,' he jumped up and in a most charming way offered them all of his cakes and went back to his luncheon. The children instinctively brought him back some of the cakes, which he not only refused, but offered them the rest of his food. They gathered in a semicircle while he spoke to them. There came something in his face and attitude which I have seen many 'cultured' people vainly attempt. He absolutely was one of them; the children stood spell-bound, dazed at the sudden transformation of a man into a child. The imagination that can become one with its object is a high form of unconscious This vague philosophy and transcendental ethics pass naturally enough, at times, into the feeling of violent revolution, where bomb-throwing, if not advocated, is emotionally sympathetic. "Just now," wrote Terry, "there is strong predisposition among the 'reds' to resort to Russian methods. It needs only the occasion, which must be waited for, and cannot be created. When the 'error' is great enough, the 'Terror' will surely rise to the occasion. Were it not for my faith in this, I should be glad to see Humanity lapse back to whence it came." In the idealist there is a growing impatience with the world; in his attempt to react even against Nature and some of the necessary qualities of men there is such inevitable failure that no moral revolutionist or anarchist can indefinitely endure the struggle. He is destroyed by his fundamental opposition to He is led into contradictions. One of them touches upon his feeling of "class consciousness." Terry at times, as a transcendental moralist, rises above this feeling, but his special instinct as a "labour" man often asserts itself against and in contradiction to his passion for the oneness of the race. In my intimate association with him I sometimes saw that, much as he liked me, he felt that I was of another "class." In the work which resulted in my book, The Spirit of Labour, I frequently came in discouraging contact with this "class" distrust of me—in him and in others. Marie alone seemed free of it, in her relation to me, and yet she wrote: "I think we have a peculiar sympathy for each other, and yet I realise that in some subtle way there is not that perfect understanding there ought to be. Just think of what extremes we two come from—how different our social environment! I know you understand as nearly as is possible for one of your class, and yet I doubt if you can really Of "class consciousness," Terry wrote: "Class feeling has always been a deep problem to me: it emanates from profound depths. This reflection concerns you. Many of your 'labour' friends here seem to regret that there "No wonder our class—the thinkers among them—rejects the morality of your class—property morality, and the rest meant only to make property morality as strong as a law of God. I made at one time the fatal mistake of the many simple labourers who are organically honest. I spent most of my best life in seeking a solution of our hard lot from those above me. After a loss of many feathers and some brave plumage, but no down, I must in "Herbert Spencer, for instance, who represents the high-water mark of a philosophy that will not hold water, pours out the vials of his bottled-up wrath on the poor unfortunates of London who are compelled 'to make a living' by tips in opening the carriage doors or holding the horses of the wealthy. He had nothing but loathing for the pregnant girl who tries to break her 'fall' by taking advantage of the 'poor laws.' For the workingman, who sincerely tries, at least, to settle the 'affairs of State' in the pot-house over a mug of ale, Spencer had nothing but contempt; "In dismissing Spencer, it is worthy of note that the very thing which made him pause in the righting of social wrongs is the thing which will cause the Revolution, namely, the complicated nature of social falsehoods. In recanting his published truth on the land question, he admitted that, although the legal title to land was obtained by murder and dispossession of original occupants, the matter was now too complicated to be dealt with. If this be so, if justice cannot be done because of the difficulties in the way, then all hail to the simplicity and elemental justice of a Red Revolution!... "Yes, sometimes I feel like the crudest of the revolutionists, although I call myself a "It is not so much that I love life, though as a rule the poor, who are so close to life, worship it in a way that puts all other things to scorn. I know nothing that reaches farther up or deeper down than this. It is only in the gutter that life is truly worshipped. And that is why I search for my last faith there—in the gutter, whence all faith really springs. "And yet to have faith even in the gutter is an act of deep imagination. In the rotting rooms beneath me lives a worker with a family of six girls and one boy. Capitalism has "Yes, I suppose I am mad. It is true that if I cannot have the intellectual red that heralds the approach of Dawn, then I want the red light of Terror that ushers in the Night. My feelings have been clamouring for many years against my cowardly better judgment. I believe some day they will break loose and throw me, as from a catapult, even up against the stone wall of atrocity we call Society." Thus the idealist becomes frenzied at times at the incredible difficulties in the way of a total revolt against society, even against nature. We shall see how the absolute nature of his anarchism led Terry further and further along the path of rejection, "passing up" one thing after another, even letting anarchism as |