live on, makes no great difference, though in your case I guess you'll
have to if you are going to live at all well. But if you get money
without earning it, it leaves you in debt to society. Somebody has to
earn the money you spend. In mine, factory, railroad, or office,
somebody works for the money that supports you. No matter where the
money comes from, that is true: somebody has to earn it. If you get it
without due labor of your own, you owe for it. Recognize that debt and
qualify yourself to discharge it. Study to put back into the world
somewhat more than you take out of it. Study to be somewhat more than
merely worth your keep. Study to shoulder the biggest load your strength
can carry. That is life. That is the great sport that brings the great
compensations to the soul. Getting regular meals and nice clothes, and
acceptable shelter and transportation, and agreeable acquaintances, is
only a means to an end, and if you accept the means and shirk the end,
the means will pall on you.
I said 'agreeable acquaintances.' A very large proportion of the
acquaintances you can make will be agreeable if you can bring enough
knowledge and a sufficiently hospitable spirit to your relations with
them. I don't counsel you to cultivate the arts of popularity, for they
are apt not to wash,--apt, that is, to conflict with inside qualities
that are vastly more valuable than they are. But keep, in so far as you
can, an open heart. There is no one to whom you are not related if only
you can find the relation; there is no one but you owe him a benefit if
you can see one you can do him.
Don't be too nice. It is such an impediment to usefulness as stuttering
is to speech,--a sort of spiritual indigestion; a hesitation in your
carbureter. By all means, be a gentleman, in manners and spirit, in so
far as you know how, but be one from the inside out.
If you had come as far as you have in life without acquiring manners,
you might well blush for your parents and teachers. I don't think you
have, but I beg you hold on to all the good manners you have, and get
more. Good manners seem to me a good deal to seek among present-day
youth, but I suppose they have always been fairly scarce, and the more
appreciated for their scarcity. Tobacco manners are uncommonly free and
bad in this generation; more so, I think, than they were in mine. Since
cigarettes came in, especially, youths seem to feel licensed to smoke
them in all places and company. And the boys are prone to too much ease
of attitude, and lounge and loll appallingly in company, and I see them
in parlors with their legs crossed in such a fashion that their feet
might almost as well be in the ladies' laps.
Have a care for these matters of deportment. Be strict with yourself and
your postures. Keep your legs and feet where they belong; they were not
meant for parlor ornaments. Show respect for people! Lord bless me! the
things I see done by males with a claim to be gentlemen: tobacco-smoke
puffed in women's faces; men who ought to know better, smoking as they
drive out with ladies; men who put their feet on the table and expect
you to talk over them! Show respect for people; for all kinds of people,
including yourself, for self-respect is at the bottom of all good
manners. They are the expression of discipline, of good-will, of respect
for other people's rights and comfort and feelings. I suppose good
manners are unselfish, but the most selfish people might well cultivate
them, they are so remunerative. In the details of life, in the public
vehicles, in crowds, and in all situations where the demand presses hard
on supply, what you get by hogging is incomparably less than what you
get by courtesy. The things you must scramble and elbow for are not
worth having; not one of them. They are the swill of life, my son; leave
them to swine.
You will have to think more or less about yourself, because that belongs
to your time of life, provided you are the sort that thinks at all. But
don't overdo it. You won't, because you will find it, as all healthy
people do, a subject in which over-indulgence tends rapidly to nausea.
To have one's self always on one's mind is to lodge a kill-joy; to act
always from calculation is a sure path to blunders.
Most of these specific counsels I set down more for your entertainment
than truly to guide you. You don't live by maxims any more than you
speak by rules of grammar. You will speak by ear (improving, I hope, in
your college environment), and you will live by whatever light there is
in you, getting more, I hope, as you go along.
Grow in grace, my son! If your spirit is right, the details of life
will take care of their own adjustment. Go to church; if not invariably,
then variably. They don't require it any more in college, but you can't
afford not to; for the churches reflect and recall--very imperfectly to
be sure--the religion and the spirit of Christ; and on that the whole of
our civilization rests. Get understanding of that. It is by far the most
important knowledge in the whole book, the great fountain of sanity,
tolerance, and political and social wisdom, a gateway to all kinds of
truth, a rectifying and consoling current through all of life.
Intensive Living
By Cornelia A. P. Comer
Said Honoria casually,--
'When I was in town yesterday, I went to see Adelaide in her new house.'
The others looked up alertly, Martha from her darning, Grace from her
Irish crochet.
'Oh, really? And how did you like the house?'
Honoria hesitated, looking to the wide view for clarification. The three
sat on a cottage veranda in the foothills of Southern California, one
February day. In front of them the landscape ran, laughing, down-hill to
the sea. Spread beneath them like a map were thirty miles of town and
country: orange orchards brave with fruit; eucalyptus groves appealing
to the sky; friendly roofs inclosed in deep-sheltering trees; great open
spaces where the wind moved free; round-topped hills, green near at hand
(for the rains had come and gone thus early), changing to a dusky blue
out yonder where the bright Pacific flashed at the end of the long,
delightful view. For love of this prospect Martha had lately left steep,
sturdy hills, brown brooks, elm-shaded streets and old friends, girding
at herself as she did so. Honoria had lived here many years, while Grace
was but a winter's guest in Honoria's home, whose hospitable brown
gables, low and wide-spreading, were visible beyond the cypress hedge
encircling Martha's cottage.
'It is a good-looking mansion. She had a capable architect. The building
is Tudor,--consistent, graceful, well proportioned. For two people it is
a very large house indeed, but it is a good house, and I see perfectly
how Adelaide means it to express the idea of dignified, comfortable
living. The decorator was not bad of his kind, either.'
'All this sounds like praise,' said Grace, 'yet I feel that you are
keeping something back. What is the matter with Adelaide's house?'
Again Honoria hesitated.
'It seems ungracious to find fault with such a perfectly worthy
performance, yet I came away chilled and uncomfortable, almost unhappy,
indeed. Thinking about the matter on the way home, it became clear to me
at last that the house is too large for Adelaide's personality. You know
how perfectly she pervaded that old house of hers. Old-fashioned, in
some respects inconvenient, with far less perfect fittings, it still was
thoroughly delightful, for where the rugs failed or the draperies
faltered, Adelaide's personality somehow stepped in and eked out all
insufficiencies, corrected all errors. It was hers entirely. In this
blameless achievement of architect and decorator, there are no
insufficiencies to be eked out, and so Adelaide's personality seems to
slip and slide helplessly upon a kind of glacial surface which it cannot
penetrate and make its own. I may be expressing myself very poorly, but
I know I have hold of something real. Adelaide's new house, good-looking
as it is, is not interesting,--that is what I mean,--and even the dear
woman herself seems less interesting, and less herself now that she is
enfolded in it.'
'Did you know,' interposed Martha, 'that the first winter in a new house
the heating actually requires more coal than is ever needed again?'
'No, I didn't know that--but I can well believe it. Why shouldn't it
take more coal to warm it when it evidently takes more vitality to cheer
it? It's a serious business, this breaking in of a large house to one's
self late in life, as so many Americans do. The draughts upon their
vital forces are more taxing than the coal bills.'
'We all ought to live in inherited homesteads,' suggested Grace,'where
the humanizing of the bricks and mortar has been done for us by our own
people.'
'Honoria,' Martha demanded, ignoring this unpractical suggestion, 'tell
me the truth! If you were in Adelaide's place and had _carte blanche_ to
incarnate your idea of a house for yourself and your family, wouldn't
you over-build and over-decorate too? I should enjoy doing it! The
furniture in my bungalow is altogether too sketchy at present, and I am
tired of eking it out with personality. You would feel differently if
you hadn't brought your old mahogany when you came West!'
Honoria set a few stitches, and looked at her friends with eyes in which
conviction flamed.
'I don't over-dress, and I don't over-eat, though I have abundant
opportunity,' she said, 'but it may be that I would over-build and
over-decorate, or at least that I would have done so until yesterday. I
don't think I would do it to-day--now that I know what ails Adelaide's
house. As for your bungalow, Martha, it is comfortable and it is alive.
There isn't a picture on the wall nor an ornament on the mantel that
hasn't a reason for being exactly where it is. That is triumph, and you
know it. I don't believe you would really exchange your house for
Adelaide's.'
'Try me and see! I would like just for once to ignore beauty and
suitability, and go in for size and sheer, luxurious comfort.'
'You would go distracted in two weeks in a place that was "sheer,
luxurious comfort" and nothing else,' returned Honoria decidedly. 'You
would hate it as you hate everything smug and fat and complacent. I have
known you too long, Martha, not to know the ways of you with a house. To
satisfy you, a domicile has to be livable. If you consider all the
houses, little and big, of your friends, you will see that there are
fixed limits to the amount of space in them that is truly and pleasantly
habitable. You can't get the lovable "lived-in look" in rooms where you
do not actually live, and you can't live all over a house that is bigger
than your needs. Why! life isn't long enough, especially if you seldom
stay at home! Think how dreary are most of the great houses we know.
Consider Mrs. King's new marble palace with its commanding site and its
ninety rooms. There isn't a single spot in it except her own bed-room
and sitting-room that wouldn't give your spirit a congestive chill if
you sat there for an hour. I know a woman in Colorado who so loathed her
big new house as it left the hands of a New York decorator, that she
would have moved back into the old one if she hadn't been afraid of her
friends' laughter. And, Grace, even inherited homesteads are sometimes
as difficult as uncongenial kin. Old houses have ways and wills of their
own.'
'Houses _are_ curious things,' said Grace. 'We take a morsel of
illimitable space and wall it in and roof it over. Suddenly it ceases to
be part of God's out-of-doors and becomes an entity with an atmosphere
of its own. We warm it with our fires, we animate it with our
affections, we furnish it with such things as seem good in our eyes. We
do this to get shelter for our bodies, but we acquire as well an
instrument for our spirits that reacts on us in its turn.'
'In other words,' returned Honoria, warming to her subject, 'as we live
our way into a house, adapting it to our need, the bricks and mortar,
the paint and plaster, cease to be inert matter and become alive.
Superficial sociologists have taunted woman with being "more anabolic or
plant-like" than man, but I count it her second glory. The plant is an
organism that "slowly turns lifeless into living matter," and this is
the thing that woman has done from the beginning with her shelter! In
our houses we achieve almost an organic extension of our very selves.
That is part of what I was trying to say. But, obviously, there should
exist some reasonable ratio between the self and its extensions. I take
it, the modern multitude of overgrown mansions, like the Kings' or the
Clays' or even Adelaide's smaller dwelling,--all these places whose
owners never find out why they are not at home in them,--are symptoms of
our modern disease of materialism. The essence of that disease is the
desire to grasp more matter than the spirit can fully animate. That the
infection can lay hold on Adelaide shows how all-pervading it is,
gripping the just as well as the unjust. When I saw her tired and
dissatisfied; when I felt the lack of charm and quality in the house,
and remembered how full of both her old house and garden had been, I
tried to think it out. It all works around to just this: you can't have
quality, you can't have charm in your material environment unless you
put them into it yourself. It is a plain question of your ability to
choose, arrange and vitalize things. And the latter requisite is by far
the most important of the three. For I have really seen, with these
eyes, poor, mean rooms where absolutely nothing was beautiful or
noteworthy, so charged with a gracious and comforting personality that
you forgot their shabbiness and said, "What a home-like place!" Please
note that that is the adjective we always use of places that draw us by
their personality--as if personality and nothing else were the essence
of home.
'Now Adelaide's old house had personality; it was completely vitalized.
It was all under her hand, and as high as her heart. But Adelaide's big
new house is as yet barren and chilly, for it is not vitalized at all.
Of course I know that after she has lived in it longer, it is bound to
improve, because it is her nature to humanize and modify all her
surroundings. But the crucial question is--_how big a house can she
humanize?_ Something bigger than a cottage probably--but certainly
something much smaller than a hotel. The longer I looked at this
question, the more it seemed to me that unconsciously I had put my
finger on the vital query that, in the ideal state, should underlie all
property, all education, all privilege.
'I have been talking about houses,--they are the most intimate, the
most organic of a woman's possessions,--but the argument applies to all
we own. It is the mark of our era to want more of everything than we can
use, yet when we get the Too-Much we demand, we are crushed by it, as
Tarpeia was crushed by the shields.'
'I have often thought' said Grace, 'that the sheer, brute mass of
life--of people to know, of books to read, of plays to hear, of pictures
to see, of things to do, buy, learn, enjoy--within reach of the
well-to-do person in the modern world, far outruns the capacity of any
human being to take it in and make of it the sane whole that a life
should be.'
'Yes--yet we go crazily on, trying to expand to illimitable
possibilities, thinking we shall be happier so soon as we have discarded
all our present belongings and opportunities for bigger, newer, richer
ones. How many people do you know who have not met a substantial
increase of income with a corresponding enlargement of their whole scale
of living, a senseless expansion sometimes out-running their increased
ability to provide for it? There is no future but chaos for a society
with such ambitions. They are centrifugal and can only lead to
disintegration.
'The truth is, we have no notion of the value and necessity of a
doctrine of limitations. Just as an illustration--not once in all the
mass of matter printed in the last twenty years about the gyro-car, the
aeroplane or other inventions capable of enormous swiftness, have I
seen the faintest intimation that human beings could not intelligently
direct a speed of two hundred miles an hour--yet the railroads are now
tardily discovering that the capacity of engineers is seriously taxed by
sixty miles!
'Don't mistake my meaning. I am not preaching the moral value of
poverty. I am no convert to asceticism. That method of ridding one's
self of the overweight of the material life is too extreme to the
correct solution. I am simply calling attention with all my might to the
æsthetic and vital value of Not-Too-Much. I am not afraid of Enough. I
am greatly afraid of Too-Much. And the reason I am afraid is this:--
'Just as the capacity of the human stomach is limited to a certain
quantity of food, so also is limited the capacity of the human spirit
for appropriating and assimilating property in its different forms.
Beyond a certain somewhat variable point, material possessions _do the
holder no more good_. The common saying, "All you get in this world is
your board and clothes," is the popular acknowledgment of this
restricted capacity. The affirmation of bounds to our capacity holds
good as regards the property of the mind--education, cultivation,
æsthetic satisfactions--just as it does of material goods. There is a
definite limit to what we can effectively make our own. Beyond that
limit, possession is a detriment.'
'The direct result of helping ourselves to too much of anything is to
coarsen and degrade. We can see this clearly as regards the primal
necessity of food. Nature promptly writes it, in large letters, all over
the man or woman of gross appetites.'
'It is as plainly printed, if in smaller type, on the faces of those who
want too much of other things,--houses, notoriety, money, power,--what
you will. The porcine brand is there, however disguised. Personally, I
fear the Mark of the Pig as I fear nothing else on earth. Shaler says
that certain lines of evolution terminate in such grotesque effects that
one almost believes the guiding thought behind the process was humorous.
I never see a stye with its squealing, shouldering inhabitants, without
thinking how tremendously satiric it is--a master-caricature of human
greed, not over-drawn! And I say, "Brother Pig, Heaven grant that I keep
my voracities better concealed than thou."'
Her companions regarded Honoria, in type thin, nervous, ardent, with a
keen and vivid face. The comparison was certainly not apparent--but the
heart knoweth its own gluttonies.
'You are doing fairly well at it thus far,' said Martha dryly. 'What's
the next step in your argument, Honoria?'
'Since our capacity is limited, and since to glut ourselves beyond it
burdens and degrades, clearly the thing for each individual with
intelligence to do is to find out where, for him, lies the golden point
beyond which riches turns to the poverty of burden. When even the wise
and earnest Adelaides get their houses too big and don't know what is
the matter, it is time to formulate the principles of First Aid to the
Prosperous. I believe the point from which the women of the comfortable
classes should attack the problem of a saner living is this doctrine of
limitation and selection, and that we should attack it first of all in
our homes.
'Now, we human beings really do something to our immediate material
surroundings which I can best describe as charging them with our
personality. With the revolution of the days, personality accumulates in
the things we handle and love and live with, much as electricity gathers
upon the accumulator of a static machine with the revolution of the
plates. This idea has always been popular with the poets and artists,
but people who advance it in everyday life always do so apologetically,
with the air of saying, "I know this is slightly fantastic, but doesn't
it seem true?" Yet most housekeepers know its utter truth. I never
doubted from the time I consciously began to care for old furniture, old
rugs, old china--all the beautiful cast-offs of vanished lives--that a
vast part of their charm was atmosphere, something imparted to them by
the affection of those forgotten ones and now inhering, for the
perceptive vision, in their very substance. The craftsman of those elder
days is not the only creator of the beauty that has come down to us.
Whoever has loved another's work has thereby added something to it. Is
it not so? And I, in my turn, ought to be beautifying my belongings for
those who come after me.'
Grace and Martha nodded readily enough, for this doctrine needs no long
expounding to any woman who has lived her way into her material
possessions, and distilled atmosphere from them for the comfort of her
household. She knows what she has done, and knows, though she says
little about it, that this business of turning lifeless into living
things is one of her important natural functions.
'When I studied physics,' Honoria went on, 'I learned that science had
been compelled to posit ether, an all-pervading, absolutely elastic,
wave-bearing substance, to explain the commonest facts of our physical
experience. Later yet, I learned that the passage of thought-waves
through ether had found defenders among men of the exact sciences.
Naturally I said to myself, "Ah, the scientists are growing 'warm.'
Next, they will be demonstrating some of the things women have always
known. They will show how we send out vibrations that get caught and
entangled in our intimate belongings, never to be wholly freed again.
The thing will be worked out and demonstrated like a problem in
geometry. Doubtless they will be measuring everybody's wave-lengths and
teaching children in the Eighth Grade easy ways of charging their
belongings with their personality so unmistakably that stealing will
have to become a lost art." Well! They haven't done it yet. In fact,
they don't seem so near doing it as they once did. The mechanism of the
process by which I take a chair fresh from Grand Rapids and in the
course of years make it _my_ chair and no other woman's, is a secret
still, but I don't have to argue with anybody who ever had a favorite
chair that the thing is as I have stated it. Neither do I have to argue
that I could not so appropriate and make my own the output of an entire
factory. It must be equally obvious that the dignified, proper
environment for me and my family contains what we can thus make our own,
and not much more.'
'Of course there are people,' said Martha reflectively, 'the routine of
whose living demands large and formal apartments, impossible to do
anything with from your point of view.'
'Assuredly there are such people,' Honoria admitted, 'just as there are
people whose entertaining must be in the line of banquets rather than
little dinners. I am not predicating a world full of model cottages,
even though I think it might prove the happiest world. Still, outside of
official circles, the need of state drawing-rooms is certainly not
general, and it is of the very gist of my argument--my argument isn't
all developed yet, Martha, don't think it!--that for the sake of
developing a finer and more individual quality in our possessions, we
should cut off some superfluous ones. Please listen patiently while I
carry the idea to its logical limit, even though that limit lies beyond
the bounds of practicability.
'Economists profess that, in an ideal distribution of goods, each man
would have as much as he could consume without waste. But this takes no
account of the differing needs of men, developed through ages of the
upward struggle, nor of their different capabilities of turning goods to
account. If you are going to dabble at all in theories of ideal
distribution, why not have one that is genuinely ideal--that is,
non-material? _The true distribution would require that each man should
possess what goods he could animate and vitalize._ Even so, how vastly
would possessions differ in amount and quality!
'If life could be adjusted on this basis, it would automatically become
simplified, charged with beauty and with character. We should slough off
ugly and useless possessions, or, if we retained through affection
things ugly in themselves, that very affection would impart to them a
certain importance and distinction. We should then, at least, live in a
world in which everything had significance. Think of the infinite
satisfaction of that!'