but that he who has so long

“All men have their faults, and envy makes those of the great as prominent as possible.

“Much to their ignominy, the assailants of Forrest have never given him credit for those high-minded and disinterested acts of generosity which those who know him best can never recall without admiration, and which, when his history is written, will leave little comfort to his maligners, professional or otherwise. We wish for him a delighted welcome back to the stage, and a complete deliverance from the toils in which his enemies have sought to destroy him.”

The house was packed to its extremest capacity, and hundreds clamored in the streets. An inscription was hung across the parquet, “This is the people’s verdict!” As he entered on his ever favorite roll of Damon, the audience rose en masse, and greeted him with waving hats, handkerchiefs, and scarfs, and long, deafening plaudits, which shook the building from dome to foundation. In matchless solidity of port he stood before the frenzied tempest of humanity, and bowed his acknowledgments slowly, as when Zeus nods and all Olympus shakes. A shower of bouquets entwined with small American flags fell at his feet. He addressed the assembly thus, constantly interrupted with cheers:

“Ladies and Gentlemen,—After the unparalleled verdict which you have rendered me here to-night, you will not doubt that I consider this the proudest moment of my life. And yet it is a moment not unmingled with sadness. Instinctively I ask myself the question, Why is this vast assemblage here to-night, composed as it is of the intelligent, the high-minded, the right-minded, and last, though not least, the beautiful of the Empire City? Is it because a favorite actor appears in a favorite character? No, the actor and the performances are as familiar to you as household words. Why, then, this unusual ferment? It is because you have come to express your irrepressible sympathy for one whom you know to be a deeply-injured man. Nay, more, you are here with a higher and a holier purpose,—to vindicate the principle of even-handed justice. I do not propose to examine the proceedings of the late unhappy trial; those proceedings are now before you, and before the world, and you can judge as rightly of them as I can. I have no desire to instruct you in the verdict you shall render. The issue of that trial will yet be before the court, and I shall patiently await the judgment of that court, be it what it may. In the mean while I submit my cause to you; my cause, did I say?—no, not ‘my’ cause alone, but yours, the cause of every man in this community, the cause of every human being, the cause of every honest wife, the cause of every virtuous woman, the cause of every one who cherishes a home and the pure spirit which should abide there. Ladies and gentlemen, I submit my cause to a tribunal uncorrupt and incorruptible; I submit it to the sober second-thought of the people. A little while since, and I thought my pathway of life was filled with thorns; you have this night strewed it with roses (looking at the bouquets at his feet). Their perfume is gratifying to the senses, and I am grateful for your beautiful and fragrant offering.”

The success of the entire engagement was unprecedentedly brilliant. Called before the curtain at the close of the final performance, he said,—

“Ladies and Gentlemen,—This is the sixty-ninth night of an engagement which, take it all in all, has, I believe, no parallel in the history of the stage. It is without parallel in its duration, it is without parallel in the amount of its labors, and it is without parallel in its success. For sixty-nine almost successive nights, in despite of a season more inclement than any I ever remember, the tide of popular favor has flowed, like the Pontic Sea, without feeling a retiring ebb. For sixty-nine nights I have been called, by your acclamations, to the spot where I now stand to receive the generous plaudits of your hands, and I may say hands with hearts in them. No popular assembly, in my opinion, utters the public voice with more freedom and with more truth than the assembly usually convened within the walls of a theatre. If this be so, I have reason to be greatly proud of the demonstration which for twelve successive weeks has greeted me here. Such a demonstration any man ought to be proud of. Such a demonstration eloquently vindicates the thought of the great poet:

Such a demonstration speaks more eloquently to the heart than any words. Such a demonstration contains in it an unmistakable moral. Such a demonstration vindicates me more than a thousand verdicts, for it springs from those who make and unmake judges.”

But despite the flattering applause of the multitude, added to the support of his own conscience, and notwithstanding his abounding health and strength and enhancing riches, from the date of his separation and desire for divorce the dominant tone of the life of Forrest was changed. His demeanor had a more forbidding aspect, his disposition a sterner tinge, his faith in human nature less genial expansion, his joy in existence less spontaneous exuberance. The circle of his friends was greatly contracted, a certain irritable soreness was fixed in his sensibility, he shrank more strongly than ever from miscellaneous society, and seemed to be more asserting or protecting himself cloaked in an appearance of reserve and gloom. In fact, the excitement and suffering he had gone through in connection with his domestic unhappiness gave his whole nature a fearful wrench, and deposited some permanent settlings of acridity and suspicion. The world of human life never again wore to him the smiling aspect it had so often worn before. His sense of justice had been wounded, his heart cut, his confidence thrown back, and his rebelling will was constrained to resist and to defy.

And why all this strife and pain? Why all this bitter unyielding opposition and writhing agony under what was and is and will be? Wherefore not quietly accept the inevitable with magnanimous gentleness and wisdom, and, without anger or fuss or regret, conform his conduct to the best conditions for serenity of soul and wholesomeness of heart, in contentment with self and charity for all? Why not rather have suppressed wrath, avoided dispute, foregone retaliation, parted in peace if part they must, and, each uncomplained of and uninterfered with by the other, passed freely on in the strangely-checkered pathways of the world, to test the good of life and the mystery of death and the everlasting divineness of Providence? How much more auspicious such a course would have been than to be so convulsed with tormenting passions and strike to and fro in furious contention! Yes, why did they not either forgive and forget and renew their loving covenant, or else silently divide in kindness and liberty without one hostile deed or thought? Thus they would have consulted their truest dignity and interest. But, alas! in these infinitely delicate, inflammable, and explosive affairs of sentiment, dignity and interest are usually trampled contemptuously under foot by passion.

Every one acts and reacts in accordance with his style and grade of character, his degrees of loyalty or enslavement to the different standards of action prevailing around him. A man held fast in a certain low or mediocre stage of spiritual evolution will naturally conduct himself in any trying emergency in a very different manner from one who has reached a transcendent height of emancipation, spontaneity, and nobleness. And there were two clear reasons why Forrest, in this most critical passage of his life, did not behave purely in the best and grandest way, but with a mixture of the vulgar method and the better one. First, he had not attained that degree of self-detachment which would make it possible for him to act under exciting circumstances calmly in the light of universal principles. He could not disentangle the prejudiced fibres of his consciousness from the personality long and closely associated with his own so as to treat her with impartiality and wisdom, regarding her as an independent personality rather than as a merged part of his own. He must still continue related to her by personal passion of some kind, when one passion died an opposite one springing up in its place. And, secondly, he could not in this matter free himself, although in many other matters he did remarkably free himself, from the tyranny of what is called public opinion. He had in this instance an extreme sensitiveness as to what would be thought of him and said of him in case his conduct openly deviated much from the average social usage. Thus his personal passions, mixed up in his imagination with every reference to the woman he had adored but now abominated, incapacitated him from acting consistently throughout with disinterested delicacy and forbearance, though these qualities were not wanting in the earlier stages of the difficulty before he had become so far inflamed and committed.

Speculation is often easy and practice hard. One may lightly hold as a theory that which when brought home in private experience gives a terrible shock and is repelled with horror and loathing. Both Forrest and his wife had reflected much on what is now attracting so much attention under the title of the Social question. They both entertained bold, enlightened views on the subject, as clearly appears from a remarkable letter written from Chicago, in 1848, by Mrs. Forrest in reply to one from James Lawson. A comprehensive extract, followed by a few suggestions on the general lessons of the subject, particularly as connected with the dramatic art, shall close this unwelcome yet indispensable chapter of the biography.

“It is impossible, my dear friend, that the wonderful change which has taken place in men’s minds within the last ten years can have escaped the notice of so acute an observer as you are; and if you have read the works which the great men of Europe have given us within that time, you have found they all tend to illustrate the great principle of progress, and to show at the same time that for man to attain the high position for which he is by nature fitted, woman must keep pace with him. Man cannot be free if woman be a slave. You say, ‘The rights of woman, whether as maid or wife, and all those notions, I utterly abhor.’ I do not quite understand what you here mean by the rights of woman. You cannot mean that she has none. The poorest and most abject thing of earth has some rights. But if you mean the right to outrage the laws of nature, by running out of her own sphere and seeking to place herself in a position for which she is unfitted, then I perfectly agree with you. At the same time, woman has as high a mission to perform in this world as man has; and he never can hold his place in the ranks of progression and improvement who seeks to degrade woman to a mere domestic animal. Nature intended her for his companion, and him for hers; and without the respect which places her socially and intellectually on the same platform, his love for her personally is an insult.

“Again, you say, ‘A man loves her as much for her very dependence on him as for her beauty or loveliness.’ (Intellect snugly put out of the question.) This remark from you astonished me so much that I submitted the question at once to Forrest, who instantly agreed with me that for once our good friend was decidedly wrong. (Pardon the heresy, I only say for once.) What! do you value the love of a woman who only clings to you because she cannot do without your support? Why, this is what in nursery days we used to call ‘cupboard love,’ and value accordingly. Depend upon it, as a general rule, there would be fewer family jars if each were pecuniarily independent of the other. With regard to mutual confidence, I perfectly agree with you that it should exist; but for this there must be mutual sympathy; the relative position of man and wife must be that of companions,—not mastery on one side and dependence on the other. Again, you say, ‘A wife, if she blame her husband for seeking after new fancies, should examine her own heart, and see if she find not in some measure justification for him.’ Truly, my dear friend, I think so too (when we do agree, our unanimity is wonderful); and if after that self-examination she finds the fault is hers, she should amend it; but if she finds on reflection that her whole course has been one of devotion and affection for him, she must even let matters take their course, and rest assured, if he be a man of appreciative mind, his affection for her will return. This is rather a degrading position; but a true woman has pride in self-sacrifice. In any case, I do not think a woman should blame a man for indulging in fancies. I think we discussed this once before, and that I then said, as I do now, that he is to blame when these fancies are degrading, or for an unworthy object; the last words I mean not to apply morally, but intellectually. A sensible woman, who loves her husband in the true spirit of love, without selfishness, desires to see him happy, and rejoices in his elevation. She would grieve that he should give the world cause to talk, or in any way risk the loss of that respect due to both himself and her; but she would infinitely rather that he should indulge ‘new fancies’ (I quote you) than lead an unhappy life of self-denial and unrest, feeling each day the weight of his chains become more irksome, making him in fact a living lie. This is what society demands of us. In our present state we cannot openly brave its laws; but it is a despotism which cannot exist forever; and in the mean time those whose minds soar above common prejudice can, if such be united, do much to make their present state endurable. It is a fearful thing to think of the numbers who, after a brief acquaintance, during which they can form no estimate of each other’s characters, swear solemnly to love each other while they ‘on this earth do dwell.’ Men and women boldly make this vow, as though they could by the magic of these few words enchain forever every feeling and passion of their nature. It is absurd. No man can do so; and society, as though it had made a compact with the devil to make man commit more sins than his nature would otherwise prompt, says, ‘Now you are fairly in the trap, seek to get out, and we cast you off forever,—you and your helpless children.’ Man never was made to endure even such a yoke as unwise governments have sought to lay on him; how much more galling, then, must be that which seeks to bind the noblest feelings and affections of his nature, and makes him—

“That there is any necessity to insure, by any means, a woman’s happiness, is a proposition you do not seem to have entertained while writing your letter of May 24th; but perhaps we are supposed to be happy under all circumstances.”

There is for man and woman on this earth one supreme happiness, one contenting fulfilment of destiny, whether there are more or not. It is a pure, calm, holy, and impassioned love, joining them in one life, filling both soul and body with a peaceful and rapturous harmony, glorifying the scenery of nature by its reflection, making the current of daily experience a stream of prophetic bliss, revealing to them authentic glimpses of God in each other, and opening eternity to their faith with mystic suggestions of worlds bygone and worlds to come, lives already led and forgotten and lives yet to be welcomed. This is the one absolute blessing, without whose appeasing and sufficing seal the human creature pines for he knows not what, and dies unsatisfied, no matter how much else is granted him. Any one to whom this divine fortune falls, and whose conscience, instead of wearing it proudly as a crown of glory in the sight of God, shrinks with it guiltily before the sight of men, is a contemptible coward, unworthy of the boon, and sure to forfeit it. As the most original thinker, the boldest diver into the mysteries of our nature, America has produced, expresses it,—

Thousands, enslaved by the conventional, distracted by the external, absorbed in the trivial, may be ignorant of the incomparable importance of the truth here expressed, care nothing about it, and give themselves up to selfish ambitions and contemptible materialities. This must be so, since the blind cannot see; and even the seeing eye sees in an object only what it brings the means of seeing; and the marvellous heights and depths of experience are fatally locked from the inexperienced. Nevertheless, the truth above affirmed survives its overlooking by the unworthy, and every man and woman gifted with profound insight and sensibility knows it and feels it beyond everything else. The great multitudes of society also have at least dim glimpses of it, strange presentiments of it, blind intuitions awakening a strong and incessant curiosity in that direction. This is the secret cause of the universal interest felt in the subject of love and in every instance of its transcendent experience or exemplification. One of the most central functions of art—whether written romance, painting, sculpture, music, or the drama—is directly or indirectly to celebrate this truth by giving it concentrated and relieved expression, and thus inciting the contemplators to aspire after their own highest bliss. To those whose emotions are rich and quick enough to interpret them, what are the finest songs of the composers but sighings for the fulfilment of affection, or raptures in its fruition, or wailings over its loss? With what unrivalled power Rubens, in his fearful pictures of love and war, has uncovered to the competent spectator the horrible tragedy all through history of the intimate association of lust and murder, libidinous passion and death! And pre-eminently the stage, in all its forms,—tragic, comic, and operatic,—has ever found, and always will find, its most fascinating employment and crowning mission in the open display—published to those who have the keys to read it, veiled from all who have not—of the varied bewitchments, evasions, agonies, and ecstasies of the passion of love between the sexes. That is the most effective actor or actress whose gamut of emotional being and experience, real and ideal, is greatest, and whose training gives completest command of the apparatus of expression, making the organism a living series of revelations, setting before the audience in visible play, in the most precise and intense manner, the working of love, in all its kinds and degrees, through the language of its occult signals. The competent actor shows to the competent gazer the exact rank and quality of the love actuating him by the adjustment of his behavior to it,—every look and tone, every changing rate and quality in the rhythm of his motions, every part of his body which leads or dominates in his bearing, whether head, shoulder, chest, elbow, hand, abdomen, hip, knee, or foot, having its determinate significance. Thus people are taught to discern grades of character through styles of manners, inspired to admire the noble and loathe the base at the same time that they are deepened in their own desires for the divine prizes of beauty and joy.

The most wholesome and triumphant art of the stage has always taught in its personifying revelation that the highest blessedness of human life is the perfect attunement of the natures of man and woman in a perfect love around which nature thrills and over which God smiles. No diviner lesson ever has been or ever will be taught on this earth. All other fruitions here are but preliminaries to this, all sacrifices penances for its failure, all diseases and crimes the fruit of its violation.

In contrast with this glorious proper fulfilment of affection, wherever we look on the history of our race we find six great chronic tragedies which dramatic art has portrayed perhaps even more fully than it has the positive triumph itself.

First, is the tragedy of the indifferent heart which neither receives nor gives nor possesses love. Thin and sour natures, frivolous, dry, cynical, or hard and arrogant,—the enchanted charms and mysteries of nature and humanity have no existence for them. They sit aloof and sneer, or plot and struggle and get money and win office, or eat and drink and joke and sleep and perish,—the amazing horrors and the entrancing delights of experience equally sealed books to them. They may attain incidental trifles, but, with their poor, shrivelled, loveless hearts, not attaining that for which man most was made, to the sorrowing gaze of nobler natures their earthly lot is a tragedy.

Secondly, is the pathetic tragedy of being loved without the power to return it. Coquetry, which has strewn its way everywhere with ravaged and trampled prizes, reverses this, and without sympathy or principle seeks to elicit and attract affection merely to pamper vanity and gratify an obscene love of power; and this too is a tragedy, but one of a fiendish import. The other is a sad and painful experience, yet with something of an angelic touch in it. It seems to hint at a great dislocation somewhere in the past of our race, causing this plaintive discord of conjoined but jarring souls, whose incongruous rhythms can never blend though in juxtaposition, like an ill-matched span whose paces will not coincide but still hobble and interfere. To be the recipient of a great absorbing love which one is absolutely unable to reciprocate is to any one of generous sympathies a keen sorrow. Sometimes too it is a sharp and wearing annoyance. And yet it is not infrequent, both out of wedlock and in it. There are limits alike of adaptation and of misadaptation to awaken love; and we can never have any more love than we awaken or give any more than is awakened in us. There are fatalities in these relations wholly beyond the reach of the will. When two persons are married whose characters, culture, and fitnesses place them on such different levels that they can meet only by a laborious ascent on one side or a distasteful descent on the other, where the ideal life of one is constantly hurt and baffled and flung in on itself from every attempt at genial fellowship, any high degree of love is hopeless. The conjunction is a yoke, not a partnership. Respect, gratitude, pity, service, almost every quality except love, may be earned. But love comes, if it come at all, spontaneously, in answer to the native signals which evoke it. In vain do we strive to love one not suited to us nor fitted for us; and a sensitive spirit forced to receive the affectionate manifestations of such a one is often sorely tried when seemingly bound to appear blessed.

The same considerations apply with double weight and poignancy to the third and larger class of tragedies of affection, namely, those who love where they are not acceptable and cannot win a return. Piteous indeed is the lot, touching the sight, of one humbly offering his worship, patiently continuing every tender care and service at a shrine which, despite every effort to change or disguise its insuperable repugnance, must still feel repugnant. And then, furthermore, there is the anguish of the homage welcomed at first and toyed with, but soon betrayed and cast away. The pangs of jilted love are proverbial, and the experience is one of the commonest as it is one of the cruellest in the world. Broken hearts, blasted lives, early deaths, terrible struggles of injured pride and sacred sentiment to conceal themselves and hold bravely up, caused by failures to secure the hand of the one devotedly beloved but idly entreated, are much more numerous than is imagined by the superficial humdrum world. They are in reality so numerous that if they were all known everybody not familiar with the poetic side and shyer recesses of human nature would be astonished. This forms a heavy item in the big statistics of human woe.

The examples contained under the head of the fourth tragedy are the experiences of those who are full of rich affections but find no congenial person on whom to bestow them or from whom to obtain a return. Accordingly, their real passions find only ideal vents in fervent longings and dreams, in music, prayer, and faith, or embodiment in industry and beneficence. Their unfulfilled affection thus either fortifies their being with the culture and good works it prompts, or opens an imaginative world into which they exhale away in romantic desires. A noble woman whose rare wealth and effusiveness of soul had not been happily bestowed, once said, with a sigh, to Thackeray, when they had been conversing of the extremes in the character of the great Swift, “I would gladly have suffered his brutality to have had his tenderness.” The remark pierces us with a keen and wide pain expanding to brood in pity over the vast tragedy of humanity pining unsatisfied in every age. Yes, exhalations of sinless and ardent desire, yearnings of beautiful and baffled passion, are wasted in the air, sufficient, if they were legitimately appropriated, to make the whole world a heaven. Ah, let us trust that they are not wasted after all, but that they enter into the air to make it warmer and sweeter for the breathing of the happier generations to come, when the earth shall be purely peopled with children begotten by pairs all whose rhythms correspond, and who love the individuality of self in one another not less because they love the universality of God in one another more.

The fifth tragedy in the history of human affection consists of the instances of those who have been blessed with an adequate love rounded and fulfilled on both sides, but who have ceased to possess it longer, except in its results. They have in some cases outgrown and wearied of their objects, in others been outgrown and wearied of, in others still been parted by death. These examples likewise are tragic each in its way, but less melancholy on the whole than the others. These have had fruition, have, once at least, lived. The memory is divine. If they are worthy, it enriches and sanctifies their characters, and, in its treasures of influence, remains to be transferred from its exclusive concentration on one and freely poured forth on humanity, nature, and God. It then prepares its possessor for that immortal future of which it is itself an upholding prophecy. And so every deep and tender nature must feel with the poet that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

But the sixth tragedy of love is the most lacerating and merciless of the whole, and that is the tragedy of jealousy. This dire passion played the most ravaging part in the domestic life of Forrest, and his enactment of it in the rôle of Othello held the highest rank in his professional career. It has also exercised a most extensive and awful sway in the entire history of the human race up to this moment. The relative place and function of the dramatic and lyric stage cannot be appreciated without a full appreciation of this hydra passion, the green-eyed monster that makes the meat it feeds on.

Even of its victims few clearly understand the ingredients and essence of jealousy. In the catalogue of the passions it is the impurest, the insanest, and the most murderous. Every composition whose elements blend in harmony is pure. Earth is pure and honey is pure, but a mixture of earth and honey is impure. So in moral subjects. Loyalty is pure, being consonantly composed of reverence and obedience; conscious disloyalty is impure, being inconsonantly composed of a perception of rightful authority and rebellious resistance to it. Now, no other passion is composed of such an intense and incongruous combination of intense opposites as jealousy. In it love and hate, esteem and scorn, trust and suspicion, hope and fear, joy and pain, swiftly alternate or discordantly mix and conflict. It is these meeting shocks of contradictory polarities repulsing or penetrating one another in the soul, rending and exploding in every direction in the consciousness of its victim, that make jealousy the maddest and most slaughterous because it is the most violently impure passion known to man. In every one of its forms, when strong enough, it is a begetter of murders, has been ever since the devil first peered on Adam and Eve embracing in Paradise, and will be until it is abolished by slowly-advancing disinterestedness. It is an appalling fact that the murders of wives by jealous husbands are tenfold greater in number than any other single class of murders. When we add to these the husbands murdered by their wives, and the despatched paramours on both sides, the wild and deadly raging of jealousy may be recognized in something of its frightful fury.

The cause of the greater prevalence of murder between the married is not far to seek. It is the weariness of an over-close and continual intimacy, with the wearing and goading irritations it engenders. It is the tyrannical assertion of the possession of one by the other as something owned and to be governed. This provokes the rebellious and revengeful instincts of a personality aching to be free; and the aggravated and ruminating desire is finally so nourished and stung as to burst into frenzied performance. And those ill-starred couples one of whose members violently destroys the life of the other are insignificant in number when compared with those who are slowly and stealthily murdered without the explicit consciousness of either party, by the gnawing shock and fret of discordant nerves, the steady grinding out of the very springs and sockets of the faculties by repressive contempt and hate and fear. A proud, sensitive woman may go into the presence of her husband an angel, and leave it a fiend, her amour-propre having been wounded in its sacredest part and filled with irrepressible resentment. Persons of genius, of absorbing devotion to an aim, are either more unhappy in wedlock or else more exquisitely blessed and blessing than others. They live largely in an ideal realm, on a ticklish level of self-respect, a height of consciousness vital to them. Socrates, Cicero, Dante, Milton, Chateaubriand, Byron, Bulwer, Kean, Talma, Thackeray, Dickens, are examples. A collision jars the statue off its pedestal. A tone of contempt or a look of indifference cuts like a dagger, tears the spiritual tissues of selfhood,—and the invisible blood of the soul follows, draining faith, love, life itself, away. The one vast secret of pleasing and living happily with high sensitive natures is sympathetic and deferential attention. Where this is not given, and there is sorrow and chafing, an intercourse which is ever a slow moral murder, and often inflamed into a swift physical murder, that liberty of divorce should be granted for which the chaste and noble Milton so long ago made his plea. Society should cease to say, Whom man has joined together let not God put asunder!

Having seen what the constituent elements of jealousy are, it now remains to probe its essence. What is jealousy in its substance and action? It is the appropriation of one person by another as a piece of property, and a spontaneous resentment and resistance to any assertion of its personality on its own part. The jealous man virtually says, “She belongs to me and not to herself. If she dares to alienate herself from me or give anything to anybody besides me, I will kill her.” The jealous woman says, “He is mine, and if he leaves me or smiles on another I will stab him and poison her.” This is the fell passion in its fiercest extreme of selfishness.

Viewed in another light it is less dreadful, though just as narrow and selfish. The lover has assimilated the beloved as a portion of his own being. His life seems bound up in her and dependent on her. Her withdrawal is a loss so impoverishing to his imagination that it threatens death. He feels that the dissolution of their unity will tear him asunder. Then jealousy is his instinct of self-preservation, rising in grief, pain and anger to repel or revenge an attack on the dearest part of his life. Still, in this form as in the previous it implies the subdual and suppression of one personality by another, and is the sure signal of a crude character and an imperfect development. The rich, generous nature, detached from himself, full of free affection, living directly on objects according to their worth, ready to react on every action according to its intrinsic claim, is not jealous. Liberty and magnanimity at home and abroad are the marks of the fully-ripened man. He knows his own personal sovereignty and abundant resources as a child of God and an heir of the universe, and frankly allows the equal personal sovereignty of each of his fellow-creatures. He claims and grants no imposition of will or slavish subserviency, but seeks only spontaneous companionship in affection. Mechanical conformity and hypocrisy can be compelled. Love, veiled in its divinity, comes and goes as it lists, and is everywhere the most authentic envoy of the Creator. Jealousy is mental slavery, spiritual poverty, the ravenous cry of affectional starvation, the blind, fallacious, desperate, murderous struggle of a frightened and famishing selfhood.

The conduct dictated by such a passion must be of the worst kind. It begins with a mean espionage and ends with a maniacal violence. Its relentless cruelty compels its objects to have recourse to the most unprincipled methods to avert its suspicion and avoid its wrath, sinking self-respect and honorable frankness in hypocrisy and fraud. Why is the word or even the oath of any man or woman in regard to a question of chastity or fidelity to the marriage vow almost universally considered perfectly worthless? It is because the penalties of dereliction on the part of woman are so intolerable, so much worse than death, that to secure escape from them the social conscience justifies means which the social code condemns. Accordingly, we see the highest personages, the greatest dignitaries and popular favorites, go into court and openly perjure themselves, while society cries bravo! The woman is so fearfully imperilled that for her rescue the fashionable standard of honor sustains deliberate perjury, the debauching of religious conscience on the very shrine of public authority.

This wicked social exculpation of the male and immolation of the female is a lingering accompaniment of the historic evolution of man, the survival in human civilization of the selfish instincts which in the lower ranks of the animal kingdom cause the stronger to drive away the weaker and monopolize the weakest. Among the most potent and fearless beasts the male, seeing any other male sportively inclined, is seized with a frenzy to kill him and appropriate the object. Animal man has the same instinct, and it has smeared the entire course of history with broad trails of blood and victimized womanhood by the double weapons of force and fear. The spectacle of the harem of one man with a thousand imprisoned women guarded by eunuchs tells the whole story. But surely when human beings, no longer remaining mere instinctive animals, become free personalities, lords of thought and sentiment, each with a separate individual responsibility distinctly conscious and immortal, they should govern themselves by spontaneous choice from within and not be coerced by an artificial terror applied from without.

The method in history of giving the strongest males possession of the females is no doubt the mode in which nature selects and exalts her breeds. But as society refines it will be seen that the strength of brute instinct, the strength of position, the strength of money, the strength of every artificial advantage, should be put aside in favor of the diviner strength of genius, goodness, beauty, moral and physical completeness of harmony. Freedom would secure this as compulsion prevents it. Man is destined to outgrow the destructive monopolizing passion of jealousy native to his animality. This is shown by his capacity for chivalry, which is a self-abnegating identification of his personality with the personalities of others, not merely freeing them from his will, but aiding them to secure their own happiness in their own way.

The effort to suppress free choice by the use of terror has been tried terribly enough and long enough. It has always proved an utter failure, viewed on any large scale. Has the awful penalty affixed to any deviation from the prescribed legal method of sexual relations wholly prevented such deviation? It has often led to concealment and duplicity,—two lives carried on at once, a life of demure conformity in public, a life of passionate fulfilment in secret. The well-understood sacrifice of truth to appearance has ever served to inflame the mistrust and swell the vengeance of the jealous. The only real remedy will be found in perfect truth, frankness, and justice. In regard to the personal autonomy of the affections, woman should be raised to the same status and be tried by the same code as man. That code should not be as now the legacy of the brutish and despotic past, but the achievement of a scientific morality, those laws of universal order which express the will of the Creator, the collective harmony of Nature. Since the unions of the sexes are of all grades and qualities, all degrees of impurity and beastliness or of purity and sacredness, the parties to them cannot be justly judged by a single rigid rule of external technicality, and ought not to be sealed with one unvarying approval of respectable or branded with one monotonous stigma of illicit. They should be judged by the varying facts in the case as they are in the sight of God; and when those facts are not known in their true merits there is no competency or right to judge the man or the woman at all. The present judgments of society unquestionably ought in many cases to be reversed. For example, it is to be said that the women who consort with men they loathe, and against their will breed children infected with ferocious passions and diseased tendencies, no matter how regularly they are married or how proud their social position, should be condemned or rescued. Also it is to be said that persons filled with a true and divine love, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned by conventional usages, claim to be left to the inherent moral reactions of their acts, and to the unprejudiced judgments of the competent. This central truth, compromise whom it may, and encompassed with delicacies and with difficulties as it may be, is to be firmly maintained, although Pecksniff and Grundy shriek at it until the whole continent quivers.

The distinction of love and freedom from lust and license is obvious, and the unleashing of the latter in the disguise of the former cannot be too vehemently deprecated. But that a man or a woman may cherish in the wedded state an impure and detestable passion, or outside of it know a heavenly one, is a truth which can be denied only by a character of odious vulgarity. The rank and worth of a love are to be estimated by its moral and religious quality in the sight of God and its natural influence on character. To estimate it otherwise, as is usually done, is to violate morality and religion with conventionality, and in place of nature, sincerity and truth install arbitrary artifice, hypocrisy and falsehood. The grand desiderata in all relationships of affection are, first, the observance of open truth and honor, second, the recognition of their varying grades of intrinsic nobleness and charm or intrinsic foulness and criminality, and the treatment of the parties to them accordingly. Meanwhile, the frank and clear discussion of the subject is imperatively needed. The double system hitherto in vogue of at once enforcing ignorance and stimulating prurience by banishing the subject from confessed attention and study into the two regions of shamefacedness and obscenity has wrought immeasurable evil. For the sexual passion, morbidly excited by nearly all the influences of society, and then mercilessly repressed by public opinion, has a morbid development which breaks out in those monstrous forms of vice which are the open sores of civilization. Take away the inflaming lures of mystery and denial—shed the clear, cold light of scientific knowledge on the facts of the case and the principles properly regulative of conduct—and the passion will gradually become moderate and wholesome. Science has brought region after region of human life under the light and guidance of its benign methods. The region of the personal affections in society and the procreation of posterity, being most obstinately held by passions and prejudices, longest resists the application of impartial, fearless study to the usages imposed by traditional authority. The consistent doing of this will be one of the greatest steps ever taken. It will break the historic superstition that the conjunction of a pair married in seeming by a priest is necessarily holier than that of a pair married in reality by God, destroy the stupid prejudice which makes in the affectional relations of the sexes only the one discrimination that they are in or out of wedlock, and remove the cruel social ban which renders it impossible for straightforward sincerity of affection and honesty of speech to escape the dishonor which double-facedness of passion and duplicity of word and deed so easily shoulder aside. And when this is done, much will have been done to inaugurate the better era for which the expectation of mankind waits.

The principal reason why the married so frequently experience satiety and weariness, and the consequent sting of a foreign hunger provocative of the wandering which gives occasion for jealousy, is that in their long and close familiarity the partners come to feel that they have seen all through and all around each other, have exhausted each other of all fresh charm, piquancy, and interest. The genuine remedy for this, the only really adequate and enduring remedy, is the recognition in each other of the infinite mystery of all conscious being, a free personality on endless probation and destined for immortal adventures. Then each will be to the other—what every human being intrinsically is—a concentrated epitome of the Kosmos and an explicit revelation of God. There is no revelation of the free conscious God except in the free conscious creature, and in every such being there is one. Let a pair be worthy to see and feel this truth, and there can be no exhaustion of their mutual interest, because before their reverential observation there can be no end to the surprises of the infinite in the finite. Then the sweetness, the wonder, the varying lure of love will never wither and die into indifference, nor roil and perturb into jealousy and madness.

No doubt to many these views will seem a transcendental romance, a delusive dream. Not every one has the nature finely touched to fine issues capable of living in the ether of these ideal heights. But there are on the earth holy and entranced souls who live there. It is obvious enough how absurdly inapplicable all this class of considerations must be to the basest kinds of persons, those who, like brutes, wallow in styes of sensuality, or, like devils, surrender themselves to the tyranny of the lowest passions. Such must needs be relegated to an inferior standard. Those whose consciences are coarser and lower than the code of society may most properly be held in subjection by its laws. But those whose consciences are purer and higher than the current social code, the nobler natures who sincerely aspire to the fulfilment of their destiny as children of God, should be a law unto themselves. They will not be tyrants over or spies upon one another. Full of self-respect and mutual respect, owning the indefeasible sovereignty of each personality in the offices of its individual being, they will pass and repass shrouded in transparent royalty, exacting no subjection, making no inquiries.

And now this long and central chapter in the life of Forrest, with the essential lessons it has for others, may be ended by a brief statement of the moral scale of degrees in the conduct of different men under the provoking conditions of jealousy.

One man detects the woman to whom he is legally united, but whom he hates and loathes, in criminal relations with another. He takes an axe, chops them in pieces, then sets the house on fire, and, cutting his own throat, falls into the flames. In other cases his insane fury satiates itself with a single victim, the man or the woman, as caprice dictates. This is crazy ferocity, making its subject first a maniac, then a tiger, then a devil. Has not humanity by its smothered approval too long kept the diabolical horror of this style of behavior recrudescent?

Another mournful and shocking form of this tragedy there is. And it is a form repeated far more frequently in its essential features than ever comes to the open light of day. A man of a sombre, vivid, and proud nature, possessed with a passion so absorbing that it sways his being with tidal power, awakens to the fact that the love he thought all his own has wandered elsewhere. His heart stands still and his brain reels. His love is too true and deep to change. To injure her is as impossible as to restrain himself. He says not a word, makes not a sign, but his sad, dark purpose is fixed. He leaves directions that no questions be asked, no public notice taken of him or of his fate further than the most modest funeral, and that a plain stone be reared over him with the single word, Infelicissimus. Then a pistol-ball in his heart closes the throbbing of an agony too great to be borne. The suicide is the pathetic slave of his passion. Surely for such there must be a sequel in some choicer world, where the tangled plot will be cleared up and the soul not be thus helplessly self-entangled.

In the third case, a husband, receiving proof of the infidelity of his honored and trusted wife, in a furious revulsion of scorn and detestation thrusts her into the street, proclaims her offence everywhere, and seeks release and redress in a public court. This is one form of the average of social feeling and conduct in such a case. It is the common spirit of revenge cloaked in justice. It may not be thought base, but it cannot be called noble.

In still another example the jealous man is now enraged and now distressed with conflicting impulses to revenge and to pardon. First he storms and threatens, then he weeps and entreats; now, he strides up and down, tearing his hair, crying and sobbing; and now he rushes out and confides his misery, begging for sympathy and counsel. And whether he condones or dismisses the offender depends on her own policy. This course, ruled by no principle, is a mess of incoherent impulse, raw and childish, a manner of proceeding of which, although it is so common, any grown-up and well-conditioned man should be ashamed.

In the next instance we see the man, on learning his misfortune in losing the exclusive affection of her whom alone he has loved, staggered by the blow, smitten to the heart with grief, flung upon himself in recoiling anguish. But, to shield her from disgrace, and to avoid shame to himself and scandal to the public, he keeps the secret sacredly; ending, however, all marriage intimacy, their lives henceforth a mere contiguity of ice and gloom until death. This is another expression of the average level of men and style of social feeling, not lower, not much higher, than might be expected.

A greatly superior example, finer and braver, comparatively rare, perhaps, yet with a larger list of performers than many would suppose, is where the fault is frankly confessed and freely forgiven, just as other faults are, or the deed justified and accepted on the ground of an integral affection and an approving conscience willing with courageous openness to take every consequence. There is valor, dignity, consistency, force of character in this. It is impossible for persons of low animal instincts or where there is treachery and lying.

But the highest degree of chivalry under such circumstances is that exemplified by the man who, cleansed from the foul and cruel usages of the past, freed from the taints of the tyrannical masculine selfhood, does what man has so rarely done, but what multitudes of women have often done. He shows a love so pure and exalted that it subordinates his selfhood and blends his happiness in that of the beloved object. For her well-being he is willing to stand aside and yield up every claim. Is such generosity beyond the limit of human nature? It may be beyond the limit of historic human nature, trailing the penalties of the past. It is not beyond the limit of prophetic human nature, carrying the purposes of God.

No doubt some barrier at present is necessary; and society has a right to give the law, from insight, but not from despotism. Monogamic union is the true relation, and its vow should not be broken by either party. But if it is broken the social penalty should be the same for man as for woman. In such case the parties should either condone or separate without furious controversy or personal revenge. Truth and fitness should be set above conventionality and prejudice, and frankness remove hypocrisy. Such alone is the teaching of this chapter, which invokes the pure, steady light of science to shine on the facts of sex, cleanse foulness out, and bring the code of society into unison with the code of God.