My Life and Loves/Afterword
AFTERWORD TO THE FIRST VOLUME OF MY LIFE'S STORY.
I had hardly written "Finis" at the end of this book when the faults in it, faults both of omission and commission, rose in swarms and robbed me of my joy in the work.
It will be six or seven years at least before I shall know whether the book is good and life-worthy or not and yet need drives me to publish it at once.
Did not Horace require nine years to judge his work?
I, therefore, want the reader to know my intention; I want to give him the key, so to speak, to this chamber of my soul.
First of all I wished to destroy or, at least, to qualify the universal opinion that love in youth is all romance and idealism. The masters all paint it crowned with roses of illusion: Juliet is only fourteen: Romeo, having lost his love, refuses life: Goethe follows Shakespeare in his Mignon and Marguerite: even the great humorist Heine and the so-called realist, Balzac, adopt the same convention. Yet to me it is absolutely untrue in regard to the male in boyhood and early youth, say from thirteen to twenty: the sex-urge, the lust of the flesh was so overwhelming in me that I was conscious only of desire. When the rattlesnake's poison-bag is full, he strikes at everything that moves, even the blades of grass; the poor brute is blinded and in pain with the overplus. In my youth I was blind, too, through excess of semen.
I often say that I was thirty-five years of age before I saw an ugly woman, a woman that is, whom I didn't desire. In early puberty, all women tempted me; and all girls still more poignantly.
From twenty to twenty-three, I began to distinguish qualities of the mind and heart and soul; to my amazement, I preferred Kate to Lily, though Lily gave me keener sensations: Rose excited me very little yet I knew she was of rarer, finer quality than even Sophy who seemed to me an unequalled bed-fellow.
From that time on the charms of spirit, heart and soul, drew me with ever-increasing magnetism, overpowering the pleasures of the senses though plastic beauty exercises as much fascination over me to-day as it did fifty years ago. I never knew the illusion of love, the rose-mist of passion till I was twenty-seven and I was intoxicated with it for years; but that story will be for my second volume.
Now strange to say, my loves till I left America just taught me as much of the refinements of passion, as is commonly known in these States.
France and Greece made me wise to all that Europe has to teach; that deeper knowledge too is for the second volume in which I shall relate how a French girl surpassed Sophy's art as far as Sophy surpassed Rose's ingenuous yielding.
But it was not till I was over forty and had made my second journey round the world that I learned in India and Burmah, all the high mysteries of sense and 
the profounder artistry of the immemorial East. I hope to tell it all in a third volume, together with my vision of European and world-politics. Then I may tell in a fourth volume of my breakdown in health and how I won it back again and how I found a pearl of women and learned from her what affection really means, the treasures of tenderness, sweet-thoughted-wisdom and self-abnegation that constitute the woman's soul. Vergil may lead Dante through Hell and Purgatory: it is Beatrice alone who can show him Paradise and guide him to the Divine. Having learned the wisdom of women—to absorb and not to reason—having experienced the irresistible might of gentleness and soul-subduing pity, I may tell of my beginnings in literature and art and how I won to the front and worked with my peers and joyed in their achievements, always believing my own to be better. Without this blessed conviction how could I ever have undergone the labor or endured the shame or faced the loneliness of the Garden, or carried the cross of my own Crucifixion; for every artist's life begins in joy and hope and ends in the shrouding shadows of doubt and defeat and the chill of everlasting night.
In these books as in my life, there should be a crescendo of interest and understanding: I shall win the ears of men first and their senses, and later their minds and hearts and finally their souls; for I shall show them all the beautiful things I have discovered in Life's pilgrimage, all the sweet and lovable things too and so encourage and cheer them and those aftercomers, my peers, whose sounding footsteps already I seem to hear, and I shall say as little as may be of defeats and downfalls and disgraces save by way of warning; for it is courage men need most in life, courage and lovingkindness.
Is it not written in the book of Fate that he who gives most receives most and do we not all, if we would tell the truth, win more love than we give: Are we not all debtors to the overflowing bounty of God?