Though One Rose From the Dead

You are very welcome to the Alderling incident, my dear Acton, if you
think you can do anything with it, and I will give it as
circumstantially as possible. The thing has its limitations, I should
think, for the fictionists, chiefly in a sort of roundedness which
leaves little play to the imagination. It seems to me that it would be
more to your purpose if it were less pat in its catastrophe, but you
are a better judge of all that than I am, and I will put the facts in
your hands, and keep my own hands off, so far as any plastic use of
the material is concerned.

The first I knew of the peculiar Alderling situation was shortly after
William James's Will to Believe came out. I had been telling the
Alderlings about it, for they had not seen it, and I noticed that from
time to time they looked significantly at each other. When I had got
through, he gave a little laugh, and she said, "Oh, you may laugh!"
and then I made bold to ask, "What is it?"

"Marion can tell you," he said. He motioned towards the coffee-pot and
asked, "More?" I shook my head, and he said, "Come out, and let us see
what the maritime interests have been doing for us. Pipe or cigar?" I
chose cigarettes, and he brought the box off the table, stopping on
his way to the veranda, and taking his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the
hall mantel.

Mrs. Alderling had got to the veranda before us, and done things to
the chairs and cushions, and was leaning against one of the slender,
fluted pine columns like some rich, blond caryatid just off duty, with
the blue of her dress and the red of her hair showing deliciously
against the background of white house-wall. He and she were an
astonishing and satisfying contrast; in the midst of your amazement
you felt the divine propriety of a woman like her wanting just such a
wiry, smoky-complexioned, blackbrowed, black-bearded, bald-headed
little man as he was.

Before he sat down where she was going to put him he stood stoopingly,
and frowned at the waters of the cove lifting from the foot of the
lawn that sloped to it before the house. "Three lumbermen, two
goodish-sized yachts, a dozen sloop-rigged boats: not so bad. About
the usual number that come loafing in to spend the night. You ought to
see them when it threatens to breeze up. Then they're here in flocks.
Go on, Marion."

He gave a soft groan of comfort as he settled in his chair and began
pulling at his short black pipe, and she let her eyes dwell on him in
a rapture that curiously interested me. People in love are rarely
interesting--that is, flesh-and-blood people. Of course I know that
lovers are the life of fiction, and that a story of any kind can
scarcely hold the reader without them. Yet lovers in real life are, so
far as I have observed them, bores. They are confessed to be
disgusting before or after marriage when they let their fondness
appear, but even when they try to hide it they are tiresome. Character
goes down before passion in them; nature is reduced to propensity.
Then, how is it that the novelist manages to keep these, and to give
us nature and character while seeming to offer nothing but propensity
and passion? Perhaps he does not give them. Perhaps what he does is to
hypnotize us so that we each of us identify ourselves with the lovers,
and add our own natures and characters to the single principle that
animates them. But if we have them there before us in the tiresome
reality they exclude us from their pleasure in each other and stop up
the perspective of our happiness with their hulking personalities,
bare of all the iridescence of potentiality which we could have cast
about them. Something of this iridescence may cling to unmarried
lovers, in spite of themselves, but wedded bliss is a sheer offense.