Since childhood [George wrote to Fox] I had wanted what all men want in youth: to be famous, to be loved. These two desires went back through all the steps, degrees, and shadings of my education; they represented what we younglings of the time had been taught to believe in and to want.
Love and Fame. Well, I have had them both.
You told me once, Fox, that I did not want them, that I only thought I did. You were right. I wanted them desperately before I had them, but once they were mine, I found that they were not enough. And I think, if we speak truth, the same thing holds for every man who ever lived and had the spark of growth in him.
It has never been dangerous to admit that Fame is not enough—one of the world’s greatest poets called it “that last infirmity of Noble mind”—but it is dangerous, for reasons which everybody understands, to admit the infirmity of Love. Perhaps Love’s image may suffice some men. Perhaps, as in a drop of shining water, Love may hold in microcosm the reflection of the sun and the stars and the ‘heavens and the whole universe of man. Mighty poets dead and gone have said that this was true, and people have professed it ever since. As for that, I can only say that I do not think a frog pond or a Walden Pond contains the image of the ocean, even though there be water in both of them.
“Love is enough, though the world be a-waning,” wrote William Morris. We have his word for it, and can believe it or not as we like. Perhaps it was true for him, yet I doubt it. It may have been true at the moment he wrote it, but not in the end, not when all was said and done.
As for myself, I did not find it so.
For, even while I was most securely caught up and enclosed within the inner circle of Love’s bondage, I began to discover a larger world outside. It did not dawn upon me in a sudden and explosive sense, the way the world of Chapman’s Homer burst upon John Keats:
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.”
It did not come like that at all. It came in on me little by little, almost without my knowing it.
Up to that time I had been merely the sensitive young fellow in conflict with his town, his family, the life around him—then the sensitive young fellow in love, and so concerned with his little Universe of Love that he thought it the whole universe. But gradually I began to observe things in life which shocked me out of this complete absorption with the independent entities of self. I caught glimpses of the great, the rich, the fortunate ones of all the earth living supinely upon the very best of everything and taking the very best for granted as their right. I saw them enjoying a special privilege which had been theirs so long that it had become a vested interest: they seemed to think it was a law ordained of nature that they should be for ever life’s favourite sons. At the same time I began to be conscious of the submerged and forgotten Helots down below, who with their toil and sweat and blood and suffering unutterable supported and nourished the mighty princelings at the top.
Then came the cataclysm of 1929 and the terrible days that followed. The picture became clearer now—clear enough for all with eyes to see. Through those years I was living in the jungle depths of Brooklyn, and I saw as I had never seen before the true and terrifying visage of the disinherited of life. There came to me a vision of man’s inhumanity to man, and as time went on it began to blot out the more personal and self-centred vision of the world which a young man always has. Then it was, I think, that I began to learn humility. My intense and passionate concern for the interests and designs of my own little life were coming to seem petty, trifling, and unworthy, and I was coming more and more to feel an intense and passionate concern for the interests and designs of my fellow-men and of all humanity.