Produced by Suzanne Shell, Lazar Liveanu and PG Distributed Proofreaders
By George W. Cable
1899
_The Solitary
The Taxidermist
The Entomologist
In magazine form "The Solitary" appeared under the title of "Gregory's
Island."_
The Solitary
"The dream of Pharaoh is one. The seven kine are seven years; and theseven good ears are seven years: the dream is one…. And for that thedream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice, it is because the thing isestablished."…
In other words: Behind three or four subtitles and changes of time, scene,characters, this tale of strong hearts is one. And for that the tale istripled or quadrupled unto you three or four times (the number willdepend); it is because in each of its three or four aspects—or separatestories, if you insist—it sets forth, in heroic natures and poetic fates,a principle which seems to me so universal that I think Joseph would sayof it also, as he said to the sovereign of Egypt, "The thing isestablished of God."
I know no better way to state this principle, being a man, not of letters,but of commerce (and finance), than to say—what I fear I never shouldhave learned had I not known the men and women I here tell of—thatreligion without poetry is as dead a thing as poetry without religion. Inour practical use of them, I mean; their infusion into all our doing andbeing. As dry as a mummy, great Joseph would say.
Shall I be more explicit? Taking that great factor of life which men, withcountless lights, shades, narrownesses and breadths of meaning, callReligion, and taking it in the largest sense we can give it; in likemanner taking Poetry in the largest sense possible; this cluster of talesis one, because from each of its parts, with no argument but the souls andfates they tell of, it illustrates the indivisible twinship of Poetry andReligion; a oneness of office and of culmination, which, as they reachtheir highest plane, merges them into identity. Is that any clearer? Yousee I am no scientist or philosopher, and I do not stand at any dizzyheight, even in my regular business of banking and insurance, except nowand then when my colleagues of the clearing-house or board want somethingdrawn up—"Whereas, the inscrutable wisdom of Providence has taken fromamong us"—something like that.
I tell the stories as I saw them occur. I tell them for yourentertainment; the truth they taught me you may do what you please with.It was exemplified in some of these men and women by their failure toincarnate it. Others, through the stained glass of their imperfecthumanity, showed it forth alive and alight in their own souls and bodies.One there was who never dreamed he was a bright example of anything, in aworld which, you shall find him saying, God—or somebody—whoever isresponsible for civilization—had made only too good and complex and bigfor him. We may hold that to make life a perfect, triumphant poem we mustkeep in beautiful, untyrannous subordination every impulse of mere self-provision, whether earthly or heavenly, while at the same time we givelife its equatorial circumference. I know that he so believed. Yet, underno better conscious motive than an impulse of pure self-preservation,finding his spiritual breadth and stature too small for half the practicaldemands of such large theories, he humbly set to work to narrow down the