The journal of a recluse

Part I— Sunrise And Noon Chapter Page

Translator's Preface v.

I. Early Memories 3

II. A Happy Accident 17

III. A Tutor of the Old Regime 26

IV. Looking Forward 36

V. On Foreign Shores 47

VI. A Fable for Communists and Dreamers of Human Perfectibility 53

VII. Still Learning 58

VIII. A Woman in Revolt 63

IX. The Old, Old Pathway, Just Wide Enough

for Two 83

X. Traveling Again 92

XL Complications loi

XII. En Route for America 109

XIII. Under the Rod 121

XIV. La Vita Nuova 132

XV. A New Acquaintance 137

Part Ii— Afternoon And Evening

I. A Voice from the Past 157

IL Dreaming Once Moke 186

III. Trying to Keep Step Together . . ... 195

IV. A Fire-side Chat 206

V. Storm and Stress 212

VI. The Surprise 22.(1 iv CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

VII. The Relapse 230

VIII. Darkness 239

IX. Dawn 250

X. Among the School-Masters . . ... 256

XI. An Experiment in Altruism 274

XII. Reunion 287

XIII. Educating a Girl 293

XIV. A Broken Spirit 307

XV. Books and Travel . . . . ^ 313

XVI. Tempeste D'Anime 319

XVII. Looking at Pictures 326

XVIII. Seed-time and Harvest 329

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

Two years ago, I was traveling for my pleasure, and incidentally for my profit, along the Pacific Coast of the United States, and found myself in a small town situated on BelHngham Bay, in the State of Washington. The town is probably not above fifty or sixty years old ; and perhaps for a long time will retain a certain raw, unfinished appearance of youth, owing to its situation too near Seattle and Vancouver, to hope to have any commercial importance. However, two or three saw-mills, and a factory for canning salmon, give it a few internal resources, sufficient to keep it alive.

One day, walking along a railroad leading out of town, skirting the bay and traversing a beautiful forest, my attention was caught by a handsome shrub, which I had seen too often in Scotland and Ireland to mistake for an indigenous plant. It was the broom, bright with yellow blossoms, and a magnificent specimen at that. It grew on a cliflf, at some distance above my head. Being a botanist in a mild sort of way, my curiosity was excited. It had been planted there, no doubt, but by whom? Probably there was a house near by — the home of some emigrant. I was thirsty; I might ask for a drink and casually learn how the broom had found its way across the sea to bloom so brilliantly on the edge of an American forest.

The bank was steep, but I made my way to the top without difficulty; and discovered, as I surmised, a fence not many feet beyond the bank, and behind it a small log hut. No smoke came irom the chimney, and the long grass about it seemed untrodden. I climbed the fence and approached the house. Then I noticed vi TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

that the door, concealed by the projecting logs, was open; and I caught a ghmpse of a woman's dress. I knocked twice at the door before the woman heard me ; and when she rose with a start and came towards me, I saw that her eyes were red and swollen with weeping. She was a beautiful woman, past her first youth, but still in the full splendor of a perfect maturity. That she was not an ordinary woman, I saw at the first glance; and when she spoke, her voice had that unmistakable accent which accompanies all real culture.

I apologized for my intrusion, and told her that a long walk in the sunlight had made me thirsty, and that I had ventured to call for a drink of water.

"There is no water in the house at present," she answered, '' but if you go down the bank, out at that little gate yonder, you will find a spring of cool water and a tin cup on a ledge of rock near by."

''Thank you, Madame; but before I go, may I ask you how that broom happens to grow just outside the fence yonder? I have never seen it except in Europe, and I do not think that it is a native of this country."

" You are quite right ; he planted it here, from seeds brought from Scotland. Pardon me, I mean my uncle. Stop — are you in a hurry? You look like a man of judgment, of education ; and see here " — she spoke hastily, the color coming and going in her cheeks — " I

have here " she turned over the pages of a pile of

note-books on the table before her, then without finishing her sentence, asked abruptly:

"Are you a reader? Do you know good books?"

" I have lived among them all my life. I ought to know them. At any rate, I have definite opinions about them, and know what I like."

"Exactly," she said with a little note of pleasure. " I thought so. Isn't it strange how one sometimes knows people at the very first glance? I, too, know what pleases me, — books that leave a sweet taste in my mouth — that without asceticism sharpen my sense

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE vii

of duty — that like mountain airs, filled with the odor of the pines, blow over me, refreshing, tonic — and here's a book like that." She passed her hand caressingly over the note-books as she spoke. *' Do you read French?"

" Yes, I passed my boyhood in France." " Good ! " Her whole face brightened, her eyes flashed with pleasure ; then in her low, rapid, musical voice, she told me that these note-books, written by her uncle who had died two years before, had only recently been found by her; that, in fact, she had just finished her first reading of them. " And," she continued, " he seems to me living again in them, just as I knew him; sensitive as a woman, yet so strong and manly ; and I cannot consent that he shall be buried here in this poor little hut, or that I alone should know him who ought to be known and loved the wide world over. Surely, when he left this record of himself, he did not mean that it should perish, and it shall not. Think of the wretched books that flood the country every year — poor little commonplace, wheezing, asthmatic books, in which their authors moan about the air's stifling them, when it is their own weak lungs that won't work right ; books made and read by women who have never lived, only dreamed about living — full of romantic nonsense, or else sickly, hysterical, striving after impassioned expression and only falling into flat lubricity ; aphoristic books, made by gathering up all the loose ends of thought in the century ; some daring, some absurd, some insane, some only wncked, a few noble ; all spewed out in a sort of hodge-podge that smells of Schopenhauer and Petronius Arbiter; inane, feeblysplashing books full of descriptions of furniture, clothes and complexions, dull and silly as the woman's page of a daily newspaper. Why shouldn't there issue from the press once in a while a book with a soul, a book that has red blood in its veins and a heart that beats sound and strong? Nobody will read it? People want the viii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

misf en scene, the decorations and all the accessories, and are indifferent about the acting? Not the people who are worth while ! — the mob, if you like, yes ! But we aren't all mob. There are still a few of us who care more about the clear blaze of the fire on the hearth than for the way in which the andirons are molded. I am sure that I am not blinded by my affection. Read that page and tell me whether it does not live."

I read it, and felt as she did, that real life had gone to the making of it.

She questioned me about myself and my pursuits, absorbed evidently in one idea. I was able to answe? her inquiries satisfactorily. The book, singularly enough, was written entirely in French. Whether the language had lent itself most readily to the author, or whether he had employed it as a sort ot v<;il to hide even from himself the nudity of his thought, it is impossible to say. At any rate, he used it Hke a master; and the present English version given to the reader must necessarily lack much of the beautiful, energetic clearness of the original.

" I cannot translate it myself," she continued. " It would break my heart again, as it has done in the reading of it. Besides, my very wish to do it well would make me stumble and halt. Then, too, I do not belong to myself. I have a husband and five children who need me; and this dear one needs me no longer. Could you undertake it, or do you know someone who could do it well ? "

In short, I consented to translate the book into English, after consultation with her husband, who confirmed the good opinion of me which the wife had so hastily formed. He is a chemist of note, and a gentleman in every way worthy of her. I stayed a week with them in their beautiful home, at some distance from the little hut in which I first met the wife : and I hope that it is not presumption to say that the friendship there formed will last throughout our lives.

I could not at once undertake the translation, owinp

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE ix

to prior engagements ; and it was decided that a careful copy of the original should be sent to me later. After mature consideration, we came to feel that the book had nothing to say in the author's name that was not equally valuable under any other name ; and that, as some with whom his life had been most intimately associated were still living, it was altogether best and most fitting that the real names should be suppressed, and fictitious ones substituted for them. It is the sort of semi-obscurity which he himself would have best liked.

Upon the back of each one of the eight note-books which comprise the original manuscript is written *' Le Journal d'un Reclus"; yet in the strict sense of the word this man was no recluse ; on the contrary, his life was rich in contact with that of others; but there was in it that subtle aloofness created by destiny which makes it possible for a human life to flow silently among other lives without contracting their color or taking their course; just as the Gulf Stream threads its blue way through the ocean unchanged by the waters that surround it. It was written without any division into chapters, and I have taken the liberty to subdivide it, for the convenience of the reader.

This book is the story of a wounded heart, searching its cure in soHtude and labor; the story of a quick brain capable of thinking for itself; of a strong character that finds the best solution of life's problems in the words, growth, work, and duty; the story of a scholar who finds rich solace in books and study, and judges wisely what he reads.

The mere story of his life may possibly interest a few readers who will not otherwise care for the book, for it is not devoid of incident or romance; but to those who love to sound the great questions of human life — the mission of grief, the aim of culture, the true use of life — the book will speak in the voice of a friend, a rare, new companion whoi?e acquaintance they will be glad to make.

X TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

Here was a man who dared to look into the abyss, and who dared to say to the shadows of it: I will live with you, believing that the sunshine will one day penetrate here; a man whose mind rose above all petty short-sighted systems of philosophy, and knew^ how to accept the unknowable without flattering his self-love by giving fine names to his ignorance. Enlightened by sorrow, he grew wise without asceticism, indulgent without weakness, tender without demanding tenderness in return, broad without losing the lim.itations of individuality, a philosopher without ceasing to be a man. He knew how to renounce happiness without despising it, and how to find joy in the smile of an infant, or the flight of a bird. His old age was more beautiful and happier than his youth ; for his life was a ceaseless growth, and with the fruits of his rich experience, he knew how to enrich others. He began as we all do by asking of life all or nothing, and he finished by understanding what some of us never do, why something is not only better than nothing, but better than all.

In this simple story of his life, told without any attempt to produce a work of art, he has produced a book that will be especially suggestive and valuable to all thoughtful men and women to w^hose care the education of the young is entrusted. Receiving in his youth an exceptional mental training, endowed by nature with the shrinking, sensitive temperament of the artist, without the artist's creative gift, capable of acute suffering and acute joy, finding himself out of harmony with the requirements of competitive struggle in commercial life, he did not sink into a mere puling sentimentalist, or harden into a sneering cynic ; he found, or rather, made a place for himself, independent and helpful ; and worked out a clear, sane view of life, which he expresses in many a terse, wholesome and tonic aphorism.

For this reason, his book is destined to live more than a summer season. It does not glitter with brilliant paradoxes that flatter the surface intelligence and

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xi

tickle the senses, without feeding the heart. It is thicksown with the truths we Hve by, not the semi-truths by which we amuse ourselves. Its atmosphere is wholly an outdoor one. The wind blows through it: sunlight, not candle-light, shines there ; and the air is sweet with the odor of pines and wild flowers.

It will speak in no unmistakable tones to those who suffer, who think, who aspire; for its author missed none of the deep experiences of life. He, too, had to walk in darkness for a season and grope for light. Tears glisten on the pages of his book. It would not be human without them; but it is not water-soaked. It preaches no sniveling gospel of despair. It recognizes the beauty and strength of self-possession, and the weakness and slavery of passion. The author does not hug his chains, gild them with illusions, and call them ornaments. He is not transformed by his desires into a monster of colossal egotism who assumes for himself a title of superiority and the right to be a law unto himself. He recognizes the profound moral truth that whoever arrogates to himself the title of superhuman, ends by becoming inhuman. His heart is too big, too warm to wish for a moment to break the tie which unites him to his kind.

The style of the book in its original French is easy, rich, and limpid as a mountain stream. The author is not of those who mistake muddiness for depth ; nor is he of those who, for want of thought, fall into long and minute descriptions of exteriors. He seizes on essentials; he etches, he does not paint. He writes because he has something to say ; and he wishes to be read and understood by those who care more for the picture than for the frame. The whole man in his simplicity and earnestness appears in his book. But we shall let him speak for himself. He knows better how to do it than we.

PART I SUNRISE AND NOON

CHAPTER I April 12, l8

There are days when we seem to be born anew into the pure joy of living, such as children and all healthy young- animals feel. The stupidity and weariness tha't had benumbed our faculties melt away like morning mists, and the sun bursts out warm and brilliant. Curiosity and interest in everything revive. Without knowing it,^ we go about with a smile on our lips, or break into singing. Life seems once more to need no particular aim, but to be aim and joy in itself. We are glad simply to be alive.

Here I am, alive to the finger-tips on such a day. I shall soon be forty; and I feel as if I were but twenty, with the future still before me, big with hope and promise.

I have just been reading Cellini's autobiography in that familiar, simple old Italian whose strength and suppleness no translation can possibly render. What a superb mixture it is of arrogance and humility, hard common sense and the wildest superstition, ribaldry and poetry, courage and cowardice, coarseness and refinement, tenderness and brutality (I note how beautifully reverent he always is when he speaks of Michelangelo), crime and innocence — in short, the whole gamut of human strength and weakness is there, illuminated by great genius.

Is it immense egotism or an immense generosity that makes a man capable of giving himself so entirely to posterity, even to the innermost folds of his heart? I think I could not do it, were I to suffer a thousand deaths for the omission. That is because I am not

4 THE JOURNAL OF A RECLUSr

rich enough. I should shrink into a corner, ashamed of my rags and my nakedness; yet I, too, have hved, thought, feU keenly, suffered much — and isn't that^ the essence of literature ? What is wanting to the writers of to-day is that they have not known real difficulties, noble sufferings. Life has been too easy for them. They can't sit on stone benches any more; they must have cushions under them. They don't know the meaning of courage. They whine when they cut their fingers. All their pains are coUcs— fits of indigestion; their nausea is not of rice, but of surfeiting. If they were capable of believing in God, they would ask nothing of him but an exemption from the evils that attend the excessive gratification of their lusts. The soul! the soul! the souU that is what we want of you; not your houses, vour furniture, your decorations, your diseases, your satieties. \Miat have you done to deserve to walk upright instead of going on all fours? Tell us

that! .

Cellini opens his biography by saymg that all men, no matter their condition, if they have done an>thmg worth while, ought with their own hand to write a description of their Ufe; but ought not to commence doing so until they have passed the age of forty.

And I? Have I done an>1;hing worth while, hved to any purpose whatever these forty years? To the wounded, sohtude and silence! But the wound r.o longer bleeds; I can look calmly on the scar which I shall earn- to my grave. I can look with gratitude on these long days and long nights in the heart of a wood whose silence has been at times an impassioned eloquence to me. A great sorrow or a great disillusionment sets us apart, creates a soUtude about us, even in the market-place. The hum of voices seems to come to us from afar, and from away below us. It is as if we were hfted on high, where the only real life there is, is concentrated in our throbbing veins and centered in the tumuh of our thoughts. Fortunate are those who have not been numbed and chilled in this solitude, but can find articulate speech for grief, translating it into music, poetry, or the vivifying strength of a great thought or noble deed.

Noble, encouraging lines these of Goethe:

Ah, if I, too, could gather my errors, my struggles, my sufferings into such a Blumenstrauss, what would I not give? There are times when I have suffered intensely from wanting the power of expression. There is a poet in me who has never found his wings, never possessed the magnificent power of transforming his griefs into song, else there is not a tear I have shed but should glitter in verse, not a sigh I have breathed but should make music in prose.

Something makes me feel to-day that though blasted at top, like some old oak of the forest, the roots of me live yet, and could send their sap up into living branches capable of bearing fruit. Who knows? Let me look myself squarely in the face from the pages of this little note-book; let me recall the past once more, to be done with its sorrow forever; or rather, to be sure that I have digested its pain into the red blood of courage and power.

My father, George Graham, whose name and whose physical vigor I have inherited, was the head gardener of a Scottish nobleman whose estate lay among the Braid Hills near Edinburgh. From one of its heights we could overlook the city; and with a slight change of names I might sing with Walter Scott:

"Blackford! on whose uncultured breast. Among the broom, and thorn, and whin, A truant boy, I sought the nest, Or listed, as I lay at rest.

While rose, on breezes thin, The murmur of the city crowd, And, from his steeple jangling loud, Saint Giles's mingling din."

How I love her! this Auld Reekie, with her proud outlook on the water, her old castle perched on a granite cliff and seeming to grow out of it as naturally as some stunted pine among the rocks ; her narrow crooked streets and long lines of gray houses pressed close together; her monuments and old palace, eloquent of the life of the past! How often I have rambled about her streets a dreaming boy, fancying miyself some knight or chevalier ready to do battle for my country, or to die for the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots. I remember how I envied the young Douglas who rowed her across Lochleven, dropping the keys of the castle into the lake; — and would have eagerly bartered my life and lain dust and ashes in his place, to have had his privilege to look at her beautiful face.

It is a great thing for an imaginative child to be born in a town with memories like Edinburgh. He feels himself as it were legitimated — the atmosphere of poetry nourishes him ; and his poverty sits light on him, if he be poor; for is he not rich in historical reminiscences?

The house in which my father lived with his family was a very pretty little lodge at the entrance of the park, in the midst of which was the castle of his master. I still remember with delight the picturesque beauty of this house made of rough, brownish-gray stone, but almost entirely concealed by vines and climbing roses ; and the odor of sweet briar or of the honeysuckle exhaled at night-fall gives me even now a singularly desolate feeling of homesickness by recalling this pretty nest of ours.

My father was a man of very unequal humor, otherwise a really superior man, loving a good book better than the idle chatter of an empty head. This taste undoubtedly preserved him from drink, the besetting weakness of many men of his station, and kept him at home. There were days when he was altogether charming, showing without egotism his singular good sense, quick wit, and sincere cordiality. Unfortunately, these days were not frequent; there were many more of them when he was taciturn, easily fretted, and even savagely morose. We children had a habit of saying to mother when we had not yet seen him in the morning, and she came to call us, or help one of us dress, " Is the sun shining?" If she said, "Ah, no, my children, it is very cloudy to-day ! " we kept out of his way as much as possible, talked in whispers, and played no noisy games within his hearing.

I believe that my mother, who was patience and kindness itself, was not very happy with him. She was gentle and forgiving; but she could not always forget, on the days of his kindness, the cruel words with which he had hurt her in ill humor. I never in my life heard him beg her pardon ; but when he had been very sarcastic, he used to show his repentance by gathering the choicest flowers and laying them in her lap, or at her plate; or he would bring her some choice fruit and insist upon her eating it. Sometimes, though very rarely, he would stoop and kiss her. He was much taller than she, with strong black hair, a swarthy skin, and dark eyes that glowed like live coals when he was angry. She was blonde, blue-eyed, and plump, a little below the medium height, naturally the sweetest tempered, most tranquil of women ; but, in his presence, she always seemed anxious and nervous. She was wholly uneducated, so far as books are concerned ; but she supplied this lack by natural shrewdness, a great deal of practical ability, so that her very fingers seemed to think, and a simplicity and natural grace full of charm. She would have answered exactly Moliere's idea of what a woman should be. She had been very pretty as a girl. I have a small colored sketch of her that would pass for a copy of a head by Greuze; and in growing stouter with advancing years, if she lost much of that early infantile freshness, she gained by a sweet air of maternity and goodness that attracted the confidence and affection of all who saw her.

She was the mother of nine children, of whom I was the third child and the first boy. My father had some theories of his own about education, which he determined to carry out with his children. Undoubtedly, he himself had often been tormented by tastes and ambitions out of harmony with his station; and he had resolved that none of his children should suffer in a like manner. He thought the great majority of men incapable of self-government, and cited the horrors of the French Revolution to prove it. He had, therefore, a profound distrust of all theories of social improvement, as a result of what is called the education of the masses, because he thought them incapable of assimilating an education. Of course, he could not help admitting that there were exceptional cases scattered among them: Burns and Ferguson had taught him that; but such men in receiving the gift of genius had also received the power to educate themselves, under any circumstances ; and with what fire he quoted Burns to prove it:

" What's a' your jargon o' your schools. Your Latin names for horns an' stools; If honest nature made you fools,

What sairs your grammars?

Or knappin-hammers.

" A set o' dull, conceited hashes, Confuse their brains in college classes! They gang in stirks, and come out asses,

Plain truth to speak; An' syne they think to climb Parnassus

By dint o* Greek 1

" Gie me a spark o' nature's fire.

That's a' the learning I desire; Then though I drudge thro dub and mire

At pleugh or cart, My muse, though hamely in attire.

May touch the heart."

He was a Tory by conviction, and not by inherited opinions ; and so far above feeling class envy that he used to declare that no greater misfortune could oveitake the human race than their arrival at a stage of perfect natural equality; and that all social and individual progress, all charm in the variety of human types and conditions of life, all the higher feelings of sympathy, reverence, affection, depend on this very inequality which exists among men. " Who will build your houses, dig your sewers, pave your streets, till your fields, on the day when you are all artists and poets ? " he would say; and again, *' It is a great misfortune for a man never to have known a superior. I would rather look up than stoop continually. I would rather admire than despise." In which views, I think he was altogether right.

As for his children, he wished to give them the strength of body and mind that comes from perfect physical health, and the freedom and independence that come from the privation of all luxuries. " Cleanliness," he used to say, " is the luxury of the poor. I want no one to outstrip you in that."

Our food, therefore, was always abundant enough and varied enough, within the necessary limits ; but it was always very simple; however, as we brought a healthy appetite to it, we ate it with a relish that few children at present know anything about. We had meat twice a week, good creamy milk for our porridge, and a wholesome rye bread which my mother made to perfection. We had a few chickens and they lo THE JOURNAL OF A RECLUSE

furnished us with eggs, and a little garden which supplied us with the ordinar}- vegetables. But we had neither candy, chewing-gum, cakes, nor imported fruits, and I was ten years old before I had ever tasted anything but home-made sweets. At New^ Years and Christmas, mother made us a big pan of taffy, which, carefully hoarded, sometimes lasted three weeks. But, taffy at any other time would have seemed to us all only one of the sublime impossibilities of iairs'-tales. Neither did we ever own such a thing as an artificial toy. My sisters' dolls w-ere ingeniously fashioned out of a bit of wood which my father whittled into the rude semblance of a doll, burning eyes, nose, and mouth into the face wnth a red-hot poker. A long straight stick was my hobby-horse, and I pranced about, astride it, rearing, kicking, running, jumping wnth it, and getting a hundred times more exercise, and more varied at that, than if it had been the finest of painted rocking-horses. I am inclined to think that the exercise of the imagination in a child's play gives a keener zest to it when he is left in this way to find his own pla\i:hings and invent his ow^n games. Left to ourselves we were never at a loss for amusement : a pretty pebble in the pathway, an early flower, a brightly colored leaf, a curved bit of bark to sail on a stream, made us rich for hours. My oldest sister, four years my senior, was the leader and promoter of most of our games; her quick fancy invested every thing about her with life: and she had a really wonderful way of making us share her imaginative gift. There were certain trees in the park we used to visit gravely; talk with them, and converse about them, as if they were human beings. She invented names for them, entertained us with their extraordinary adventures ; and we were sad for a week when the lightning struck one of