IX.

MR. JAMES'S REPLY.

To the Editor of the New York Tribune:

I declined controversy with your correspondent, Mr. S. P. Andrews, not because of any personal disrespect for him, but chiefly for the reason stated at the time, -that his objections to my views of divorce were trivial, fallacious, and disingenuous. I may now further say that his general opinions on the subject in discussion between the "Observer" and myself did not, besides, seem to me of sufficient weight to invite a public refutation. I may have been mistaken, but such was, and such continues to be, my conviction. It is, accordingly, more amusing than distressing to observe that your correspondent's vanity has converted what was simply indifference on my part into dread of his vast abilities. But lest any

of your readers should partake this delusion, let me say a few words in vindication of my conviction.

We all know that marriage is the union, legally ratified, of one man with one woman for life. And we all know, moreover, that many of the subjects of this union find themselves in very unhappy relations to each other, and are guilty of reciprocal infidelities and barbarities in consequence, which keep society in a perpetual commotion. Now, in speaking of these infidelities and barbarities, I have always said that they appeared to me entirely curable by enlarging the grounds of divorce. For, holding, as I do, that the human heart is the destined home of constancy and every courteous affection, I cannot but believe that it will abound in these fruits precisely as it becomes practically honored, or left to its own cultivated instincts. Thus I have insisted that, if you allowed two persons who were badly assorted to separate upon their joint application to the State for leave, and upon giving due securities for the maintenance of their offspring, you would be actually taking away one great, existing stimulant to conjugal inconstancy, and giving this very couple the most powerful of all motives to renewed affection. For, unquestionably, every one admits that he does not cheerfully obey compulsion, but, on ⚫the contrary, evades it at every opportunity; and it is matter of daily observation that no mere legal bondage secures conjugal fidelity where mutual love and respect are wanting between the parties. You instinctively feel also that a conjugal fidelity which should obey that motive chiefly would be a reproach to the

name.

You feel that all man's relations to his fellows, and especially to woman, should be baptized from above, or acknowledge an ideal sanction before all things, and that where this sanction is absent, consequently the relation is either strictly infantile or else inhuman. In respect to this higher sanction and bond of conjugal fidelity, you call the legal bond inferior or base. As serving and promoting the former, one deems the latter excellent and honorable; but as ceasing any longer to do so, you deem it low and bestial. Now, I have simply insisted that the legal sanctions of marriage should, by a due enlargement of the grounds of divorce, bet kept strictly subservient and ministerial to the higher or spiritual sanction, having, for my own part, not the shadow of a doubt that, in that case, constancy would speedily avouch itself the law of the conjugal relation, instead of, as now, the rare exception.

In this state of things your correspondent appears on the scene, professing, amid many other small insolences and puerile affectations, not to be "cruel" to me, and yet betraying so crude an apprehension of the discussion into which he is ambitious to thrust himself that he actually confounds my denunciation of base and unworthy motives in marriage with a denunciation of the marriage institution itself! I have simply and uniformly said that the man who fulfils the duties of his conjugal relation from no tenderer or humaner ground than the law, whose penalties secure him immunity in the enjoyment of that relation, proves himself the subject of a base legal or outward slavery merely, instead of a noble and refining sentiment. And hereupon your sagacious and alarming correspondent cries out that I resolve "the whole and sole substance of marriage into a legal bond or outward force, which is diabolical and should be wholly abolished and dispensed with." Surely your correspondent must admit that, when a man and woman invoke the sanction of society to their union, neither they nor any one else look upon society's action in the premises as a constraint, as a compulsion. Why? Because society is doing the precise thing they want it to do. With united hearts they beg of society 'to sanction their union, and society does so. Your correspondent can not accordingly be so dull as to look upon society's initiatory action as compulsory? The marriage partners, at this period, are united by affection, and they deride the conception of a compulsory union. But, now, suppose that this affection, from whatever cause, has ceased, while the legal sanction of their union remains unchanged; can not your correspondent understand that the tie which now binds them might seem, in comparison with the pure and elevated one which had lapsed, "a base legal bondage, a mere outward force"? If he can not, let me give him an illustration exactly to the point. I find a piece of private property, say a purse of money, which the law, under certain penalties, forbids me to appropriate. Out of regard to these penalties purely, and from no sentiment of justice or manliness, I restore it to the owner. Hereupon my spiritual adviser, while approving my act, denounces the motive of it as derogatory to true manhood, which would

have restored the purse from the sheer delight of doing a right thing, or, what is equivalent, the sheer loathing of doing a dirty one. What, now, would your correspondent think of a verdant gentleman who, in this state of things, should charge my adviser "with destroying the institution of private property, with resolving it into a base legal bondage, and dooming it to an incontinent abolition"? Would he not think that this verdant gentleman's interference had been slightly superfluous? But whatever he thinks, one thing is clear, which is that the realm of logic will not for a moment tolerate your correspondent's notion of "Individual Sovereignty." Whoso violates the canons of this despotic realm by the exhibition of any private sovereignty finds himself instantly relegated by an inflexible Nemesis, and in spite of any amount of sonorous self-complacency, back to the disjected sphere which he is qualified to adorn, and from which he has meanwhile unhandsomely absconded.

I am sure that it is only this foolish notion of the "Sovereignty of the Individual" which obscures your correspondent's mother-wit. I call the notion foolish, because, as I find it here propounded, it is uncommonly foolish. As well as I can master its contents, it runs thus: That every man has a right to do as he pleases, provided he will accept the consequences of so doing. The proposition is strikingly true, although it is anything but new. Thus you are at liberty, and have been so since the foundation of the world, to eat green apples, provided you will accept a consequent colic without wincing. Or you are at liberty to prostitute, by dishonest arts, your neighbor's daughter, provided you are willing to encounter for so doing the scorn of every honest nature. Or the thief is at liberty to steal, provided he will bear the consequences of doing so; and the liar to lie, provided he will accept the consequences of lying. All these are instances of "Individual Sovereignty." They illustrate the doctrine more than they commend it. For, while no rogue ever doubted his perfect freedom to swindle, on condition of his accepting its consequences, I take it that no rogue was ever such a goose as to view that condition itself as a satisfactory exhibition of his sovereignty. As a general thing, rogues are a shrewd folk, and I suspect you would canvass all Sing-Sing before you would light upon a genius so original as to regard his four irrefragable walls as so many arguments of his individual sovereignty.

To think of a preposterous "handful of men in the nineteenth century of the Christian era "accepting and announcing for the first time in the world"—and no doubt also for the last-"the sovereignty of the individual, with all its consequences"-however disorderly, of course- "as the principle of order as well as of liberty and happiness among men"! Was ever a more signal proof given of the incompetency of democracy as a constructive principle than that afforded by this conceited handful of fanatics? They are doubtless more or less men of intelligence, and yet they mistake the purely disorganizing ministries of democracy for so many positive results, for so much scientific construction, and identify the

reign of universal order and liberty with the very dissolution of morals and the promulgation of abject license! In the discolored corpse they see only the blooming hues of life, and in the most pungent evidences of corruption recognize the flavor of immortality. Your correspondent professes to admire "pluck," but it seems to me that the "pluck" which takes a man blindly over a precipice and leaves him crowing at the bottom over an undamaged sconce and an unperturbed philosophy necessarily implies the usual accompaniment of sheep's-head also.

Your correspondent kindly applauds an observation of mine to the effect that "freedom is one with order"; and I infer from the general tenor of his letter that I have hitherto enjoyed a quasi patronage at his hands. Now, I will not affect an indifference, which I by no means feel, to the favorable estimation of your correspondent, or any other well-disposed person, but I am incapable of purchasing that advantage at the expense of truth. It would doubtless greatly suit your correspondent if, when I say "freedom is one with order," I should also add, "and order is one with license," but I really cannot gratify him in this particular. Somehow, as he himself naively phrases it, when I "apply my intellect to deduce that conclusion, it flickers out into obscurity and darkness." Rather let me say, it reddens into a lurid and damnable falsehood. I can not, therefore, regret the withdrawal of a patronage of which I have been both unworthy and unconscious. I can not reduce my brain to mud, were my reward to be the approbation even of a much more plenary "handful” of individual sovereignties than that represented by your correspondent is ever likely to grow.

For my own part, Mr. Editor, I can conceive of no “individual sovereignty” which precedes a man's perfect adjustment to nature and society. I have uniformly viewed man as under a threefold subjection, first to nature, then to society, and finally to God. His appetites and his sensuous understanding relate him to nature; his passions and his rational understanding relate him to society or his fellow-man; and his ideas relate him to God. Now, as to the first two of these spheres, man's subjection is obviously absolute. If, for example, he indulge his appetites capriciously or beyond a certain limit, he pays a penalty, whatever be his alleged "sovereignty." And if he indulge his passions beyond the limit prescribed by the interests of society, he pays an inevitable penalty in that case also, however sublime and beautiful his private pretensions may be. To talk of man's sovereignty, therefore, in either a physical or moral point of view, save as exerted in the obedience of physical and moral limitations, is transparent nonsense. And even regarded as so exerted, the nonsense is scarcely more opaque. For what kind of sovereignty is that which is known only by its limitations, which is exercised only in subjection to something else? There are, indeed, indisputable sovereigns without any territorial qualifications, but their titles are allowed only because they are men of diseased faculties, whom one would be unwilling to rob of a soothing illusion.

What, then, is the sphere of human freedom, of human sovereignty? It is the sphere of ideas, the sphere of man's subjection to God. As ideas are infinite, as they admit no contrast or oppugnancy, as they are perfectly good, and true, and beautiful, so, of course, the more unlimited a man's subjection to them becomes, the more unlimited becomes his freedom or sovereignty. He who obeys his appetites merely finds himself speedily betrayed by the inflexible laws of nature to disease and death. He who obeys his passions merely finds himself betrayed by the inflexible laws of society to shame and seclusion. But he who obeys ideas, he who gives himself up to the guidance of infinite goodness, truth, and beauty, encounters no limitation at the hands either of nature or society, and, instead of disease and shame, plucks only the fruits of health and immortal honor. For it constitutes the express and inscrutable perfection of the divine life that he who yields himself with least reserve to that most realizes life in himself; even as He who best knew its depths mystically said, Whoso will lose his life temporarily shall find it eternally, and whoso will save it shall lose it.

But the indispensable condition of one's realizing freedom or sovereignty in this sphere is that he be previously in complete accord with nature and society, with his own body and his fellow-man. Because so long as a man's physical subsistence is insecure, and the respect of his fellow-men unattained, it is evident that his highest instincts, or his ideas of goodness and truth, can receive no direct, but only a negative obedience. His daily bread is still uncertain, and the social position of himself and family completely unachieved; these ends consequently claim all his direct or spontaneous activity, and he meanwhile confesses himself the abject vassal of nature and society. In this state of things, of course, or while he remains in this vassalage, while his whole soul is intent upon purely finite ends, the ideal sphere, the sphere of infinitude or perfection, remains wholly shut up, or else only faintly imaged to him in the symbols of a sensuous theology. I say "of course," for how can the infantile imagination of man, instructed as yet only by the senses, receive any idea of a good which is infinite? It necessarily views the infinite as only an indefinite extension of the finite, and accordingly swamps the divine life-swamps the entire realm of spiritual being-in gross materiality.

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No man accordingly can realize the true freedom he has in God, until, by the advance of society, or, what is the same thing, the growing spiritual culture of the race, he be delivered from the bondage of appetite and passion. A's appetites and passions are as strong under repression as B's. Why does he not yield them the same ready obedience? It is because society has placed A above their dominion by giving him all the resources of spiritual culture and bringing him accordingly under the influence of infinite ideas, under the direct inspirations of God. The sentiment of unity he experiences with God involves that also of his unity with nature and society, and his obedience to appetite, therefore, can never run into vice, nor his indulgence of passion into crime. In short, the inexpugnable condi