You must talk to yourself about this, night and day, until this desire is so awake in you that you can't go idle many moments without its rushing into your mind, and giving you a kind of electric shock. And when that happens you fling aside every thing else, every idea but the work that you ought to be doing, and put all your faculties upon that; and every time that you catch them wandering, you do the same thing again, and again. Some times when I become very keenly aware of myself, and of what a shallow creature I really am, it seems to me that it is only by wearing myself out in that grim and savage way that I can make myself even tolerable.
I must stop. Do you know that for five precious hours by my watch I have sat up here thinking about you and writing to you? Dear me—and I am tired, and frozen, for there is a cold wind. I shall have, I see, to prove some of my powers, by not writing letters to you when I should be at the book.
I see that it takes four or five days for letters to
come and go between us; and so if we write often, our letters will be crossing. Four or five days is time enough for us to change our moods a dozen times, so our correspondence will be apt to be complicated!
Ill
MY DEAREST THYRSIS:
It has worried me somewhat to-day that you might be utterly disappointed in the letter I wrote you. It was a wild jumble of words, but I was fighting all sorts of uncomfortable things within me. To-day I have been anything but despairing, and have "gone at" the German. In fact, I quite lost myself in it, and believe I understand thoroughly the construction of the first poem. Wonderful accomplishment!
Your words, as I read them again, dear heart, are full of a great beauty and fire and energy, and I only hope you may keep them always. I believe that the possibility of the marriage we both desire, depends greatly if not entirely on your sternness. You must realize it.
I cannot tell with the proper conditions and training what energy I might be able to accumulate for myself, but in the meanwhile the thing that makes me most wretched is my utter incapacity at times, and my inability to share with you your work. In my weaker and more helpless moods, I ask myself with a pang, whether I ought to go with you at all, when I cannot help you. But I must stop fuming. I have come out of my mud-puddle for good and for all, and that is the main consideration. I don't intend to go back.
We must not think of each other in any way but as co-workers in a great labor; we must simply know that
our love is rooted deeply, and the harder we work the more firm it will be. There is no reason why we should not go to the altar with just this sternness, and from now on preserve this attitude until the day when we have earned the right to consider what love means. Can you do it? I will prove to you that I can.
IV
MY DEAR THYRSIS:
I am trying very dreadfully, and go away alone and pound at the German as if my life depended upon it. I go to bed every night with a tight feeling in my head, but I do not mind, as I take it for a guarantee that I have not rested.
And oh, my dearest, dearest and best, I am trying not to think of you too much—that is too much in a way that does not help me to study. But I love you really, yes, truly, and I know I would follow you anywhere. I am not particularly joyful, but then I do not expect to be for a great many years.
DEAR THYRSIS:
Only a few words. *I have been hovering to-day between spurts of hopeful energy, and the most indescribable despair. It positively freezes my heart, and I have been on the point of writing to you and telling you to relieve yourself of the responsibility of me. The reason is because it seems a perfectly Herculean task to read "Egmont". I have to look up words in the dictionary
until I am absolutely so weary I care not about anything; and then I think of you, and what you are able to do, and at one word from you I would give up all idea of marrying you.
I tell you I am up and down in this mood. Great God, I could work all day and all night if I could do what you do, but to strain at iron fetters—a snail! Oh, I cannot tell you—I simply groan under it. At such times I have no more idea of marrying you than of journeying to the moon. I repeat to you, to be constantly choked back, while you are rapidly advancing, will kill me. I don't know what you will say to this, but it is intolerable, unendurable, to me. When I think of your ability and mine, I simply laugh about it —Thyrsis, it is simply ridiculous. I do not ask you to take me with you, Thyrsis.
Do you wonder at my writing all this? You would not if you understood. It is so hard for me to keep any joy in my heart, and I get tirejd of repeated failures, that is all. I thought I must write you this, and have it over with. This is the style of letter I have always torn up, but this time it goes. I think I will practice the piano now, and try to get some gladness into my soul again.
VI
MY DEAR, DEAR THYRSIS:
There is a dreadful sort of letter which I wrote you last night which I haven't sent you yet.
I have been studying, or trying to most of the day, and my mind has wandered most painfully. There were two days in which I seemed to have hold of myself, but with an effort that was a fearful strain. I must try
so, that it almost kills me, if I wish to accomplish even a little of what I ought. The heat here is almost insupportable, it is stifling, and I spent an hour or so in the water this afternoon.
And the thought is always torture to me—that you are accomplishing so much more than I! I was thinking of your letters to-night, and I recalled some words that seemed to speak more of your love for me. Oh, Thyrsis, if your letters are fiery and passionate, is it for love of me that they are? I'm almost afraid at times, when I read your letters—when you tell me of the kind of woman you want to love.
I at present am certainly not she. And do you know that when we are married we shall be united forever? I don't know why I write you these things, they are not at all inspiring thoughts to me.
And yet I was able to go in swimming this afternoon, and forget everything and frolic around as happily as any water-baby!
VII
MY DEAR CORYDON:
I came off to write my poem, but I have been thinking about you, and I must write a long letter. It is one of the kind that you do not like.
In the first place, you complain of the contradictions in my letters. I am sorry. I live so, struggling always with what is not best in me, and continually falling down. Also, in this matter I am an utter stranger, groping my way; and there is an element of passion in it, a dangerous element, which leads me continually astray.
I can only say that in my ideal of love, which is utter
love and spiritual love, I think of living my life with you in entire nakedness of soul. Therefore. I shall
mt
always be before you exactly as I should be by myself. And I shall write you now exactly what I have been thinking, what is hard and unkind in it, as well as the rest. You will learn to know me as a man far from perfect, often going astray himself, often feeling wrong things, often leading you astray and making you wretched. But behind all this there is the thing often lost sight of, but always present—the iron duty that I have, and the force in me which drives me to it.
All this morning I have been thinking of my book, losing myself in it and filling myself with its glory. This afternoon I fell to thinking about us; and thoughts which have been lurking in my mind for a long time got the upper hand for the first time. They were that I did not love you as I ought to, that I could not; that the love which I felt was a thing from my own heart, and that it had carried me away because I was anxious to persuade myself I had found my ideal upon earth; that you could not satisfy the demands upon life that I made, and that if I married you it would be to make you wretched, and myself as well; that you had absolutely nothing of the things that I needed, and that the life which your nature required was entirely different from mine; that you had no realization of the madness that was driving me, could find and give me none of the power I needed; and that I ought to write and tell you this, no matter what it cost—that I owed it to the sacr-ed possibility of my own soul, to live alone if I could live better alone. And when I had said these words, I felt a sense of relief, because they were haunting me, and had been for a long time.