January 1 — The Little Room
I remember that long ago when I used to be made to memorize Campbell’s sentimental lines on The Exile, beginning,
“There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin”—
they only called forth my unsympathetic infantile jeers; but last spring I went home. Suddenly, as we passed along the tawny marshes lying like great dun lions by the edge of the misty gulf, I realized that for twenty discontented years I too had been suffering the pangs of the Exile. Memories and emotions, so long disused as to be almost forgotten, boiled up with the impetuosity of geysers. Possessions of my secret life that I think I was never really conscious of at all came to life. I haven’t the least idea, for example, why the buoyant feathery boughs of the first Southern cedar I saw made me strongly wish to weep lovely, sentimental tears, but I knew at once why I had invariably felt bored with the conventional admiration of mountains. Why, indeed, should scenery only be important when perpendicular? To my mind, to have the landscape getting up on its hind legs and hiding the view is simply tiresome. Here one could see everything—could open one’s lungs and breathe what the Creoles used to call la grande air, and let one’s heart go out to the land.
You blessed mother country! Those people where I have lived so long seem not to care particularly for their birthplaces. Their patriotism is satisfied by an immense political abstraction and a striped flag. I have always suspected that if one took off the heads of such folk and looked down inside one would find inside only wheels and coiled springs, instead of flesh and blood. David Yandell used to say, “I’m for the Yandells against the whole world, but if it’s between the Yandells and Dave, then I’m for Dave!” One might be for that political abstraction against the world, but between that abstraction and Louisiana, then I’m for Louisiana.
I began to suspect too that some of my heresies and revolts had really been caused by the bitterness of exile, though from the very beginning I have seen the King without his mantle. When my elders handed out to me the accepted platitudes in answer to my early attempts to realize the world in which I moved, I stared at them “in a wild surmise,” the aforesaid conventionalities appearing to me to be so at variance with the facts as I saw them. They appeared to me—these elders—to be imagining a King’s cloak to cover the world as it really was; to be neglecting and minimizing the things really worth while; to be inventing ideals and standards not in themselves noble.
I struggled long against the mask and domino which muffled words and impeded action, but time and the years have made me more patient. I have grown to see that they may have their uses. The average man shrinks aghast from the naked truth, even when it is beautiful. There is a sort of universal prudery that shrinks from the nude in life as well as in art. Perhaps these universal draperies cover as much that is repulsive as it does of the beautiful.
Verestchagin, the Russian painter who was blown up on the Petropalovsk, had three pictures with him when he was in this country that conveyed to me a much needed lesson. He called them “Christ in the Wilderness,” “The Sermon on the Mount,” and “The Cursing of Jerusalem.”—A haggard boy fleeing to the desert for meditation upon the tragedies of existence, for which he is sure there must be some panacea if one could only think it out; the triumphant youth announcing to humanity the solution of all its difficulties; and the disappointed man crying reproachfully to the heedless multitude preferring its own old way—“how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!”
As time cools our cocksureness, more and more is one willing to let the world go its own gait and retire into one’s secret life; and there comes at last one day a revelation of the meaning of it all, and this revelation brings peace and poise. The four walls of character and environment are an unescapable prison. Heroic effort will not open a door or break through its blank solidity. One may look out upon the world from one’s little room, but there one must live one’s appointed time. In youth one does not understand or accept this: then anything seems possible of expansion or change, but veillesse savait.
Once this is accepted—not by word alone, but mentally grasped and realized—the disordered, confusing bits of existence fall at once into an ordered pattern. Life must be lived in the Little Room. Others may not enter; one’s self may not escape. Action falls within its space and can, therefore, be calmly ordered and planned. One will not undertake aught that is impossible within its compass, and struggle, discontent, and confusion are therefore at an end. And within this inviolate enclosure one is safe and private. To those regarding it from without its appearance is much like that of all the other cubicles, but inside, if one chooses, it may be richly hung, sumptuously adorned, with the treasures of one’s secret life. Odd, outworn weapons of opinion may give a martial touch to the walls here and there; treasures brought up from the deep may speak of the wild winds of young fancy, and taste yet of the salt of long dried tears. Soft imaginings may invite the weary head, fine embroideries wrought from the many-coloured threads of life may lie beneath the foot. The prison is, should one choose it, a palace.
Long ago, of a summer morning, threading with soundless paddle and slow-sliding canoe one of the quiet streams that wound like a blue vein across the sunburned breast of those marshes, I found in the deep grasses, that everywhere grew breast high, an illimitable garden of flowers. Looked at from above there was but the smooth, deep fleece of verdure—but thus intimate, close to the warm skin of these vast salt prairies, thousands of beautiful freakish blossoms revealed themselves—many-tinted, heavy as wax, fragile as cobwebs, perfumed, fantastic, multitudinous....
I stared a little, pondering, and then passed on carelessly about my childish business, unrealizing that I had found a picture and a parable to hang, after many years, upon the walls of my Little Room.