was thirty years old when I saw her for the first time. We did not speak, we were not introduced, but I knew that I must meet her; I knew that love which had hitherto been gnawing in my imagination and my senses, had found an object. I fell in love at first sight. She did not see me—and I sometimes think she has never seen me since, although we are married and have lived together for fifteen years.
Life had prepared me to love. I was born sensitive and passionate, and had acquired more emotion than I was endowed with. I had acquired it partly through ill-health and ignorance as a lad, and partly through an intense sex-imagination to which I habitually and gladly yielded. My boyhood was filled with brooding, warm dreams, and partial experiences, always unsatisfied, and leaving a nature more and more stirred, more and more demanding the great adventure.
Then, in youth and early manhood,—as a student, a traveler,—experiences came rich enough in number. The mysterious beauty and terrible attraction that woman has for the adolescent was not even relatively satisfied by my many adventures. Each left me more unsatisfied than before. My hunger for profound relationship grew so strong that all my ideas of beauty, in art, in life and in nature, seemed to be a mere comment, a partial explanation, of that which was a flame in my soul.
This explanation, this comment derived from art, while the ultimate result was greater inflammation, so to speak, yet often temporarily soothed. This was especially true of philosophy and reflective poetry. I had no interest in metaphysics as such, but when, in the university, the magnificent generalizations of philosophy first came to me, I thought for a time that I had found rest.
Dear Wordsworth! How he cooled my fevered senses and soothed my heart and mind; how he pleasingly introduced into every strong sensation an hygienic element of thought which made the whole into warm reflection rather than disturbing impulse! And dear Philosophy! Who, when taught to see things from the viewpoint of eternity, could be intensely unhappy about his own small Self and its imperfections? In Plato, in Spinoza, in Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, I felt the individual temperament struggling to free itself, as I had been struggling to free myself, from too great an interest in Self through the contemplation of what seemed to be the eternal and unvarying truth.
But then, with returning strength, there came metaphysical skepticism. These great structures of philosophy seemed to me to be houses of cards, toys for imaginative children. And at the same time there burst upon me, with renewed intensity, the world of sensuous art, the direct, disturbing force of Nature, the mysterious appeal of Woman. Philosophy had prepared me for a greater absorption in life than would otherwise have been possible. It helped to make me incapable of what men call practical life, and made me attach values only to significant things.
And it lent to my most trivial relations with women the spiritual quality of meaning. Even in the midst of transient sensuality, the eternal flow of Nature, and the inherent significance of all sex life, no matter how impersonal and unindividualized, gave a constant and inevitable spirituality. It was a torturing, promising spirituality. It beckoned to something beyond, dropped strangely disturbing hints of what might be. In the midst of kaleidoscopic women, the Unknown Woman was suggested, foreshadowed. These sensual-poetic experiences were purifiers of the amorous temperament, rendering it at once more passionate, more spiritual and more classic, less mixed with prejudice, with the indecency of ignorance, with unclear as well as unclean theological taboos. I went through every phase of so-called coarse sexual experience, and thereby strengthened and purified my spiritual demand for the Great Adventure. If I had not known women, I should never have known woman; nor could I have loved Her so essentially, so absolutely as I have.
With this past behind me—a past full of the pleasures of thought and sense, of the pain of self-doubt, of strenuous struggle for self-realization, for self-understanding—I met Her. In spite of my thirty years, I was as youthful as a faun endowed with a mind and who had recently partly escaped from a theological conception of life. From the Present of Paganism I looked back to the sensual struggles of escape from the secondary results of a defeated theology.
And she! How different her nature and her past from mine! She had never struggled with herself. She did not need to, for herself did not disturb her. Imperturbable, she struggled only with her work, with what she was trying to form. She was an artist, and singularly unconscious of herself. Keen to external beauty, she was not interested in the subjective nature of her Soul, or its needs, or how it worked. In fact, her soul seemed to have no needs. I often told her she had no soul, but I was wrong, as we shall see.
Along one of the corridors of the world she passed me for a moment, and I knew that I must love her. She was a thing of beauty! It was not merely her lovely skin and hair: she was one of those rich, dark blondes who seem to have absorbed the light and warmth of the sun and to have given it a definite form which introduced the spiritual quality of the brunette—blond in color, brunette in quality. There was nothing bleached about her, nothing faint, nothing iridescent. Her color and quality were that of saturation. It was as if in her skin and hair warmth and color lay suspended, as it lies suspended in dropping summer rain.
But I know it was not her skin and hair that I loved. What I loved I feel now, though I did not analyze it then, was the integrity of her physical and nervous nature. She was no self-conscious neurasthenic, as I was! She was cool, unconscious, poised—cold, the ignorant would call her. And the Silence which breathed from her when I first saw her has been hers ever since. Never, even in agony, has she been noisy. Her deep quiet comes as a disturbing thing, to most people, and it has been often the cause of quarreling between us—for I, nervous, with a volcanic past, frequently challenged this quiet soul, challenged it morally and socially, succeeded, to my immense satisfaction, in disturbing it once or twice, but being more often disturbed and irritated myself!
I maneuvered a meeting, and many, many followed, and have been following for fifteen years. Our first few meetings showed me that she had no past! All that she could or can remember is that she had worked—worked calmly and quietly, without excitement. Her life as a child was as calm as that of a plant. I have a whole world of violent emotions remembered, stretching along from my third or fourth year. She has no remembered childhood. She grew too beautifully, too gradually, too quietly, to have occur those cataclysmic things which one remembers. And she still grows!
I suppose what drew us together was Wonder. I marveled at her strange and beautiful integrity, the wholeness and calmness of her being. My vivid nature, my tremulous needs, my spiritual restlessness, interested her. I loved her, and for me she felt a deep amusement. The strangeness I felt in her seemed beautiful; the strangeness she felt in me seemed interesting and amusing. And for years the only word of approval I ever heard from her was the word “amusing.” I can imagine Mona Lisa saying the same word, in exactly the same spirit, meaning intellectually entertaining.
“A thousand years old am I,” she would say. And I seemed so young to her; amusingly young. I suppose all lovers are young, no matter how many years they have. And yet it was I who had definite experience, as the world commonly understands that word. And she had had none. And yet she was old and I was young. She was not naïve, she was not fresh. She was like the Sphinx, wonderful, old, with a beauty that to me at times was terrible. And I charmed her because I was so pleasingly social, so civilized, and had so many ideas derived from life, ideas which pleased her mind and stirred her sense of poetry and humor. I loved her for the essence of her being, and she liked me warmly for what I was able to say and feel.
Especially for what I was able to say! How she would listen! I know that if what I have said to her could be recorded, it would pass as literature. I am proud only of that one thing: that to her I talked well—really well—for years. I told her all—all of my life, and I think it must have seemed to her like the life of some inhabitant of Mars. Surely, there was in our relationship a deep unfamiliarity—I was strange to her and she was infinitely strange to me. But I loved her strangeness, and my strangeness only interested her. Being profoundly kind, that interest finally awoke emotion in her—but it was not the love of the real and mysterious spiritual form which is at the basis of every human being. She felt æsthetically my qualities. She did not love Me.
It was this which made me bitter, at times, during many years, and even now comes to me like some essential pain. Quite unjustly so—and yet inevitable. When I saw awaken in her, in later years, some such feeling for other men as I had for her, a feeling not based on what they could say or do or even feel, but on what her imagination told her they deeply were, an indescribable rage would take possession of my soul.
Perhaps that rage was merely jealousy, that loathsome feeling based on an incredible sense of possession, but I do not believe that. After my genuine social thought began she might have had all manner of relations with other men, without deep disturbance on my part; I might have been unmoved, had she seen me, once and forever! But as I have said, she felt only my qualities, my gifts of the mind, heart, and spirit. She did not have an immediate, temperamental understanding and love for myself! And to have this feeling for some soul is a need of all deep natures. When I saw this need in her—unsatisfied by me—reaching out to others to whom she had no coherent relation—only the mysterious, temperamental, almost metaphysical one that we mean when we say “in love”—it was then that the rage came upon me! Was it jealousy? It was strong and terrible, whatever it was, capable of overpowering all the acquired canons of civilization and making of me an incarnate, miserable, bestial Demand!
I imagine that at least a part of this pain is derived, at any rate in my case, from an egotistic sense of something deeply essential that is lacking in oneself. If this deep woman, who admired and warmly liked me in every nameable way, could not feel the temperamental stir, could not feel me as distinguished from the sum of my qualities, what was the matter with me? What did I deeply lack? I had no crude lack. Physically and mentally I was competent. I could meet her desires in every obvious way. Yes! But the Real Self is not obvious. That, to her, was lacking; that most mysterious, and yet to the eye of the amorous imagination, most real thing of all, which needs no expression to manifest itself, that she never saw! Perhaps that is lacking in me! This fear may partly account for the pain I felt. What strenuous soul can endure the thought that perhaps he is lacking in a way so deep that it is unanalyzable?
Sometimes I would think that it was my partly-shattered nervous system. How could this woman’s nature, with its sweet integrity, love anything but that which had developed in the most beautiful way? I loved her partly because she had grown without harm. I had not grown without injury; and one perhaps cannot love æsthetically, temperamentally, the injured. My very injuries accounted for my eloquence, my intensity of feeling. This naturally would interest, but how could an æsthetic soul love the shattered cause of even fine things? I have never known a keenly expressive person who was nervously sound; and the nervously unsound are not æsthetically beautiful, however productive they may sometimes be of beautiful things. It shows a fine instinct in a woman to love only what in itself is lovely, without materialistic or sentimental regard for what that thing may do, say, or feel.