about giving me up, you must not think that is cold, but know that it is my faithfulness to my vision, which is the one thing to which I owe any duty in the world. Nor is it right that you should expect to be essential to me, when I have labored to be all to myself. You could become necessary to me in the years to come; if I marry you to-day I shall marry you for what you are to become, and for that alone—at any rate if I am true to myself.
If you are to be my wife you are to be my soul—to live my soul’s life and bear its pain. You are to understand that I talk to you as I talk to myself, call you the names I call myself, and if you cry, give you up in disgust; that I am to deny you all pleasure as I do myself, and what God knows will be ten thousand times harder, let you take pleasure, and then spring up in the very midst of it—you know what I mean! That I am to be ever dissatisfied with you, ever inconsiderate of your feelings, and ever declaring that you are failing! That however much I may love you, I am to be your conscience, and therefore keep you—just about as you are now, miserable! You told me that you would gladly be whipped to learn to live; and this can be the only thing to happen to you.
You must understand why I act in this way. I am a weak and struggling man, with a thousand temptations; and when I marry you, you will be the greatest temptation of all. You are a beautiful girl, and I love you, and every instinct of my nature drives me to you; for me to live with you without kissing you or putting my arms about you, will remain always difficult. It will be so for you, as for me, and it will always be our danger, and always make us wretched. Your soul rises in you as I write this, and you say (as you’ve said before) that if I offered to kiss you after it, it would be an insult. But only wait until we meet!
This is the one thing that has become clear to me: just as soon as there comes the least thought of satisfaction in our love, just so soon does it cease to satisfy my best self. You cannot satisfy my best self, you do not even know it; and if it were a question of that, I should never dream of marrying you! I love you for this and for this alone—because you are an undeveloped soul, the dream of whose infinite possibilities is my one delight in the matter. I think that you are perfect in character, that you are truth itself; and therefore, no matter how helpless you may be, I have no fear of failing to make you “all the world to me”, provided only that I am not false to my ideal. You must know from what I have written before that I can love, that I do know what love is, and that you may trust me. I am not trying to degrade passion—I simply see how passion throws the burden on the woman, and therefore it is utterly a crime with us—the least thought of it! I ought to consider you as a school-girl, really just that; and instead of that I write you love letters!
I tell you there is nothing more hateful for me to look back upon than that childish business of ours, that time when we went upstairs that we might kiss each other unseen. I tell you, it revolts my soul, from love and from you! I should be perfectly willing to take all the blame—I do; only I have led you to like that (or to act as if you did) and I must stop it. Can you not understand how hateful it is to me to think of making you anything that I should be disgusted with?
I expect you to read over this letter until you realize that it is, every word of it, completely true and noble, and until you can write me so. You and I are to feel ourselves two school-children and live just so. It is not usual for school-children to marry, but that we dare upon the strength of our purpose, and in defiance of all counsel, and of every precedent. We are to feel that we owe our duty to our ideal; and that simply because of the strength and passion of our love for each other, we demand perfection, each of the other. My setting this stern challenge before you is nothing but my determination to give you my right love, to demand that you be a perfect woman.
I promise you therefore no quarter; I shall make no sacrifice of my ideal for your sake. As I wrote you, I mean to be absolutely one with you, and I expect you to be the same. You shall have (if you wish it) all of my soul—I shall live my life with you and think all my thoughts aloud—study to give you everything that I have. And God only, who knows my heart, knows what utter love for you lies in those words, what utter trust of you—how I think of you as being purity and holiness itself. To offer to take any other being into my soul, to lay bare all the secret places of it to its gaze, all the weaknesses as well as all the strength, and all that is vain as well as all that is sacred! You cannot know how I feel about my heart, but this you may know, that no one else has had a glimpse of it, you are the first and the last; and so sure am I of you that I dare to say it, all my life will I live in your presence, and trust to your sympathy and truth—and feel that I am false to love if I do not. If there were anything in my heart so foul that I feared to speak of it, I should give you that first, as the sacrifice of love; or any vanity or foible—such things are really hardest to have others know, so great is our conceit.
If I could talk to you to-night, I should do just as I did up on the hill in the moonlight—frighten you, and make you wonder if there was any woman who wished to bear such a burden; and perhaps the saddest thing of all to me is that I do not bear it—instead I bear the gnawing of a conscience bitter and ashamed of itself. And could you bear that burden? For Corydon, as I look at myself to-night, I am before God, a coward and a dastard! I have not done my work! I have not borne the pain He calls me to bear, I have not wrested out the strength He put in my secret heart! And here I am chattering, talking about work to you! And these things are like a nightmare to me; they turn all my life’s happiness to gall. And you are taking upon yourself this same burden—coming to help me to get rid of it. Or if you do not wish to, for God’s sake, and mine, and yours, don’t come near me—you have come too near as it is! Can you not see that when I am face to face with these fearful things—and you come and ask me to give my life to you, to worship you with the best faculties I possess—that I have no right to say yes?
You once told me you were happy because I called you “mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich”; well, you are not in the least that. The name that I give you, and that you may keep, is “the beautiful possibility of a soul”. Remember a phrase I told you at the very beginning of our love, of the peril of “ceasing to love perfection and coming to love a woman.” And read Shelley’s sad note to “Epipsychidion”!
VIII. Dear Corydon:
You tell me in your last letter that you are leaving all who love you; and you ask “How do you know that because you love beauty, you will love me?”
I have been thinking a good deal about this; I do not believe, Corydon, that a man more haunted by the madness of desire ever lived upon earth than I. And when I get at the essence of myself, I do not believe that I am a kind man; I think that a person with less patience for human hearts never existed, perhaps with less feeling. There is only one thing in the world that I can be sure of, or that you can, my fidelity to my ideal! I know that however often I may fail or weaken, however many mistakes I may make, my hunger for the things of the soul will never leave me, and that night and day I shall work for them. I do not believe I have the right to promise you anything else, I have no right to dream of anything else; this is not my pleasure, as I feel it, it is a frenzy, it is that to which some blind and nameless and merciless impulse drives me. And I may try to persuade myself all my life that I love you, Corydon, and nothing else, and want nothing else; and all the time in the depths of my heart I hear these words from my conscience—“You are a fool.” I love power, I love life, and seek them and strive for them, and care for nothing else and never have; and nothing else can satisfy me. And I cannot give any other love than this, any other promise.
IX. My dear Corydon:
I have been taking a walk this morning, thinking about us, and that I had treated you fearfully. The whole truth of it all is this—that I am so raw and so young and so helpless (and you are as much, if not more so) that I cannot, to save my life, be sure if my love for you is what it ought to be, or even if I could love any one as I ought. And I am so wretchedly dissatisfied! Do you know that for two weeks I have been trying to write a passage of my book—and before God, I cannot! I have not the
