My Dear Cornelia/Book 2/Chapter 5
We plunged over the ridge by a steep path to the lake, in order to make the short return by the shore. The wind was now blowing hard and the waves running high. I began to feel like taking it easy, but Cornelia is indefatigable. She drew up her shoulders, threw back her head, drew a deep breath, and went cutting into the wind like a gallant yacht.
"Oh let's slow down a bit," I called. "I've only just begun to understand something. Something very important about happiness. It flashed into my mind—literally flashed—as you struck that Samothracian pace northward."
"If it's as important as that—" she said, relenting a little in her stride. "But don't you like to walk fast? Nothing makes me so happy."
"I have a theory," I said. "One can't walk fast when one has a theory. It's a theory for which you are partly, perhaps mainly, responsible."
"Then it isn't horrid, is it?"
"Oh no! It is very nice indeed. But even now, while we delay, it has grown into three theories. In the first place, there are no perfect husbands, and there is probably only one perfect wife. In the second place, happiness is in neither wives nor husbands, but only in the relation between. In the third place, people who are unhappy in marriage are so, usually, because they don't know how to give themselves to each other. In the fourth place,—it's four now,—that unhappy ignorance is chiefly due to erroneous conceptions of the self."
"Just what do you mean by the self?" she said. "My metaphysical brains are weak."
"Well, the traditional, romantic, and generally popular conception is, that the self is a very deep and precious mystery of 'the buried life,' an elusive being hidden away inside,—always inside,—in a secret garden of the personality, where it murmurs to itself the most delightful and ineffable secrets, which can be communicated to any other self only in a mystical physical fusion of selves—or confusion of selves."
"Yes," said Cornelia, "I understand that. It is something like the religious or sacramental theory of marriage, isn't it?"
"Something like some people's notion of it," I replied. "But please follow this argument. Under the illusion that the self is such a being, and only so to be come at, romantic lovers fret themselves to a fever, and decadent heroes and heroines tear each other to bits, and ignorant contemporary husbands and wives separate with bitter recriminations, each charging that the mysteriously rewarding self sought in the other was not to be found."
"Well?"
"Well, the reason it was not found is that it was not there. There is no such secret garden; there is no such mysterious self to reward the mystics of the romantic quest."
"Don't you think so?"
"No," I said, "I think, up to a certain point, our brutal modern naturalists have followed truth much more faithfully than the poets. And I believe that in educating our young people we had better follow them to the same point. My novelist friend is right in holding to his theory that Judith O'Grady and the Colonel's lady are much the same beneath the skin."
"Bah!" cried Cornelia. "If you say that again, I shall hate you."
"And I shall ask to be forgiven," I said, "and you will forgive me so graciously that I shall sin again. But I'm very serious about this. Judith and the lady are very much the same—beneath the skin."
"I hate you!" Cornelia cried. "I could stick you full of pins."
"Beneath the skin," I continued, "Judith and the lady consist of closely similar metabolic apparatus and so forth, and a certain amount of vacant space—and nothing else. And since the apparatus is the same, there is every reason to believe that it functions in essentially the same way in performing the duties assigned to it by biological destiny."
"You are disgusting," said Cornelia.
"If I dwelt too long on the point, I should be," I agreed. "Viscera and vacancy: that is what Judith and the lady have beneath the skin. And that is why I think the naturalistic novelists are foolish if they dwell too long there."
"Is this your nice theory?"
"No," I said, "it isn't; but it is a sort of basis for my theory. First, we establish the fact that the interesting and precious and desirable self isn't 'inside.' Then, don't you see, it must be outside. Well, it is outside. It doesn't exist till it gets outside. All the differentiation, the distinction, the qualities, which you and I value, are outside and are created by means analogous to the means of art. In so far as people—any people, married or otherwise—really give themselves adequately to each other in love or in friendship, and impart happiness with the gift, they give a self that is externalized, objectified, and tangible—so to speak—in some form of useful or beautiful activity, which occasions no insatiable and consuming fever, but the real joy of benefits given and received and the delight of a loveliness that descends on the contemplative eye like the free grace of God."
"Your theory improves," said Cornelia; "I don't wholly understand it; but it improves."