food in a restaurant; and I find it no more unpleasant to wash out my stomach than to wash my teeth, and it gives me perfect sleep and almost perfect health. But some sufferer may ask, 'What do you do if you get indigestion after lunch or after breakfast?' I can only reply that if it is at all painful I wash out immediately; but if it is only slight, I take a dose of an alkaline powder of a Dr. Dubois, a French master who has bettered bicarbonate of soda and all such other lenitives with his alcalinophosphate, which gives instantaneous relief. But the remedy, the infallible and blessed remedy for all ills of digestion, is the stomach pump. Thanks to it, and to strictest moderation in eating and drinking, and total abstinence from tobacco, I enjoy almost perfect health! I am certainly better now than I have been since I was thirty. 1 content myself with a couple of cups of tea in the morning; I make a good meal about one o' the clock; and in the evening take nothing but a vegetable soup and on occasion a morsel of meat or sweet. Now I can drink a small cup of coffee, even with cream, after my lunch and feel no ill effects. Almost seventy, I can run a hundred yards within a couple of seconds as fast as I could at twenty, and I do my little sprint every day.
Perfect health I have won back, but age, though kept at bay, is not to be denied. The worst part of it is that it robs you of hope: you find yourself sighing instead of laughing: the sight of your tomb there just before you on the road is always with you; and since the great adventure of love no longer tempts, one tires of the monotony of work and duties devoid of seduction.
Without hope, life becomes stale, flat and unprofitable.
The worst of all is the hopelessness. If you needed money before, there were twenty ways of making it: a little thought and energy and the difficulty was conquered; now, without desire, without joy, without hope, where can you find energy? The mere notion of a crusade fills you with distaste. 'Why?
What for? What's the good?' come to your lips as the tears rise to your eyes.
Now, too, my memory for names has suddenly become very bad. Often I remember words I want to quote, but for the moment I can't recall the writer's name. Or I go to the shop to buy a book and I've forgotten the author. All this increases my labor and is worse than annoying.
I try to think it balances another weakness of mine which is exceedingly agreeable. All my life long I have forgotten unpleasant events and ordinary people in the strangest way. My wife often says to me, 'You remember Mary or Sarah'-a servant who had done this or omitted to do that: I've forgotten her altogether. I remember my wife getting very angry with me in New York once because a second-rate writer followed me to our gate and got me to lend him ten dollars. 'Don't you remember,' she exclaimed, 'how he spoke and wrote against you not six. months ago?' I have forgotten the whole occurrence; the petty miseries of life are all overwhelmed in oblivion to me very quickly after they occur, and I count this among the chief blessings of my life. The past to me is all sweet and pleasant, like a lovely landscape sunveiled.
But the present gets steadily darker; and the future! Whitman's plaint over his Leaves of Grass at the very end echoes in my heart.
Begun in ripen'd youth and steadily pursued, Wandering, peering, dallying with all-war, peace, day and night absorbing, Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task, I end it here in sickness, poverty and old age.
I sing of life, yet mind me well of death.
Today shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and for years Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.
And yet something, is it what Goethe calls 'the sweet custom of living,' holds one in life.
I for one cannot accept the solace: with the loss of virility the glamour has gone out of life. One notices that a girl's legs are nothing wonderful; even well formed ones don't thrill and excite as they used to thrill: the magic is almost gone!
Ten years ago I read the announcements of Paris theatres with vivid curiosity; now I would hardly cross the street to witness the bepuffed sensation of the hour.
Nearly all the glamour is gone. Five years ago, I'd take up a book I had just corrected, hot from the press, with intense interest: is there anything new and extraordinary in it? Now I read and the critical sense is extravagantly keen because the glamour has gone, even from my own work. I see plainly that my fourth book of Portraits is not so good as the first two; I see that this book of short stories, Undream'd of Shores is nothing like so good as its predecessor, Unpath'd Waters!
The skies are discrowned of the sunlight The earth dispossessed of the sun.
Why then continue the struggle? Why not make one's quietus with a bare syringe? I have no fear of the undiscovered country. None! Why hesitate? I can't hope to write better at seventy than at sixty; I know that's not likely.
Why lag another hour superfluous on the stage? I don't know:
I pace the earth and breathe the air and feel the sun.
And there's a certain attraction in it, but very slight: the first hard jolt and I'll go. As it is, my wife's future restrains me more than any other factor: I should grieve her, hurt her? Yet I owe her all kindness!
There's the hypodermic syringe; tomorrow, I'll buy the morphia.
Is there, then, no pleasure in life? Oh yes, one; the greatest, keenest, and wholly without alloy, reading! And in the second line, listening to great music and studying beautiful paintings and new works of art: all pure joy without admixture. I go into my little library and take down a Chaucer: it opens at The Persones Tale and in a moment I am in a new world; I read of the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride first, 'the rote of all harmes'; for 'of this rote springen certain braunches, as ire, envie, accidie or slouthe, avarice or coveitise, glotonie and lecherie…'
I have no pride whatever, whether within the heart or without, and none of its branches, in especial 'no swelling of herte which is when man re-joyceth him of harme that he hath don'; no trace of any branch, except it be lecherie, though how that pleasant sin can be said to be affiliated to pride, I am at a loss to understand.
I read first of the 'stinking sinne of lecherie that men clepen avoutrie' (adultery) 'that is of wedded folk and the avouterers shall bren in helle.'
My withers are unwrung; I never coveted another man's wife! But then I read 'of lecherie springen divers species, as fornication, betwene man and woman, which ben not maried, and is dedly sinne and ayenst nature.'
'Ayenst nature?' Why? 'Parfay the reson of a man eke telleth him wel that it is dedly sinne; for as moche as God forbad lecherie and Seint Poule… '
Worse follows: 'another sinne of lecherie is to bereven a maid of hire maidenhed… thilke precious fruit that the book clepeth the hundreth fruit; in Latine hight centesimus fructus,' and I smile, for this sweet pleasure is not specially forbidden by 'Seint Poule.'
Finally I glance at the Wif of Bathes' confession:
I wol not lie;
A man shall win us best with flateries
And with attendance and with besinesse
Ben we ylimed bothe more and lesse, or as I learned it at school, And with a close attendance and attention Are we caught more or less the truth to mention.
Suddenly another great phrase, especially addressed to women, I believe, catches my eye, warning the fair ones not to dress so as to show the 'buttokkes behinde, as it were the hinder part of a she ape in the ful of the mone.'
Laughing merrily, I resolve not to grieve for the fullness of life or for the full moons I have missed!
Chaucer is but one of many sorcerers who can change the whole world for me and make of heavy, anxious times, joy-brimming, gay hours of amusement and pleasant discourse. And this entertainment I can vary at will; pass from smiling Chaucer to rapt Spenser and hear him telling of … her angel face That made a sunshine in a shady place.
Thank God! There are hundreds of books I want to read: I must learn Russian and see a new part of God's world; and I've heard of a new Spanish poet from Nicaragua, Ruben Dario, a love poet of the best, whose prose also is remarkable.
And Arno Holz, whom I met in Berlin, has honey at the heart of him; and Schopenhauer is there, whom I've not listened to for five and twenty years, and so many, many others, thank God. Enough for years! I hate my ignorances: there is Willie Yeats, a compatriot and certainly one of the greatest poets writing in English today, the winner last year of the Nobel prize. And above and beyond them all, Heinrich Heine, whose life I almost wrote and always wished to write-Heine, after Shakespeare, the most lovable of men, 'the best of all the humorists,' as he said himself, the wisest of moderns, save in his own affairs. I wonder why Heine never wrote any dramas or novels?
