<h3> In Retrospect </h3>
<p>The world is dosed with too much religion. Life is to be learned from
life, and the professional moralist is at best but a manufacturer of
shoddy wares. At the ultimate remove, God or the life force, if
anything, is an equation, and at its nearest expression for man—the
contract social—it is that also. Its method of expression appears to
be that of generating the individual, in all his glittering variety and
scope, and through him progressing to the mass with its problems. In
the end a balance is invariably struck wherein the mass subdues the
individual or the individual the mass—for the time being. For,
behold, the sea is ever dancing or raging.</p>
<p>In the mean time there have sprung up social words and phrases
expressing a need of balance—of equation. These are right, justice,
truth, morality, an honest mind, a pure heart—all words meaning: a
balance must be struck. The strong must not be too strong; the weak
not too weak. But without variation how could the balance be
maintained? Nirvana! Nirvana! The ultimate, still, equation.</p>
<p>Rushing like a great comet to the zenith, his path a blazing trail,
Cowperwood did for the hour illuminate the terrors and wonders of
individuality. But for him also the eternal equation—the pathos of
the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an ultimate
balance must be struck. Of the strange, tortured, terrified reflection
of those who, caught in his wake, were swept from the normal and the
commonplace, what shall we say? Legislators by the hundred, who were
hounded from politics into their graves; a half-hundred aldermen of
various councils who were driven grumbling or whining into the limbo of
the dull, the useless, the commonplace. A splendid governor dreaming of
an ideal on the one hand, succumbing to material necessity on the
other, traducing the spirit that aided him the while he tortured
himself with his own doubts. A second governor, more amenable, was to
be greeted by the hisses of the populace, to retire brooding and
discomfited, and finally to take his own life. Schryhart and Hand,
venomous men both, unable to discover whether they had really
triumphed, were to die eventually, puzzled. A mayor whose greatest
hour was in thwarting one who contemned him, lived to say: "It is a
great mystery. He was a strange man." A great city struggled for a
score of years to untangle that which was all but beyond the power of
solution—a true Gordian knot.</p>
<p>And this giant himself, rushing on to new struggles and new
difficulties in an older land, forever suffering the goad of a restless
heart—for him was no ultimate peace, no real understanding, but only
hunger and thirst and wonder. Wealth, wealth, wealth! A new grasp of a
new great problem and its eventual solution. Anew the old urgent
thirst for life, and only its partial quenchment. In Dresden a palace
for one woman, in Rome a second for another. In London a third for his
beloved Berenice, the lure of beauty ever in his eye. The lives of two
women wrecked, a score of victims despoiled; Berenice herself weary,
yet brilliant, turning to others for recompense for her lost youth.
And he resigned, and yet not—loving, understanding, doubting, caught
at last by the drug of a personality which he could not gainsay.</p>
<p>What shall we say of life in the last analysis—"Peace, be still"? Or
shall we battle sternly for that equation which we know will be
maintained whether we battle or no, in order that the strong become not
too strong or the weak not too weak? Or perchance shall we say (sick of
dullness): "Enough of this. I will have strong meat or die!" And die?
Or live?</p>
<p>Each according to his temperament—that something which he has not made
and cannot always subdue, and which may not always be subdued by others
for him. Who plans the steps that lead lives on to splendid glories,
or twist them into gnarled sacrifices, or make of them dark,
disdainful, contentious tragedies? The soul within? And whence comes
it? Of God?</p>
<p>What thought engendered the spirit of Circe, or gave to a Helen the
lust of tragedy? What lit the walls of Troy? Or prepared the woes of an
Andromache? By what demon counsel was the fate of Hamlet prepared? And
why did the weird sisters plan ruin to the murderous Scot?</p>
<p class="poem">
Double, double toil and trouble,<br/>
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.<br/></p>
<p>In a mulch of darkness are bedded the roots of endless sorrows—and of
endless joys. Canst thou fix thine eye on the morning? Be glad. And if
in the ultimate it blind thee, be glad also! Thou hast lived.</p>
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