I saw the Sweet Harbinger of Spring last week. A violet? No. A swallow?
No. A bud? No. Ah! no; put up your encyclopedia of Spring information
and I'll tell you. It was the annual boy with his shoes off for the
first time since the warm weather. He stepped gingerly; he stood still
longer than usual; he hoisted the bottom of his foot for inspection
often; he let a cat go by, though a rock lay in a yard of him; he
picked out a velvety place on the tan-bark sidewalk before he put his
feet firmly down and squared himself on them to give the two-finger
whistle for his chum, which is the terror to the nervous. Much of the
boy had gone out of him. He moved with the motion and sloth of decrepit
age. Next week you will not know him for the same boy. His feet will
be hardened, he will dance over the macadam mixed streets with the
callosity of a stone-crusher, and the fugacious cat will be lucky if
it gets its tail through the fence in time. The mourner's bench humility
of today will have changed to the noisy glee of the hardened criminal.
His baseball practice will pervade the middle of every street, and his
large and assorted stock of general trouble and annoyance will be
displayed under all our noses with the request that we will call and
examine before purchasing elsewhere. I cannot understand how any man
can be indifferent to the blessings of the church, when he remembers
that one of them is the Sunday School--invented by the Fathers as an
ingenious and effective place of torment for this Boy. Through the
week he is intolerable, but the blessed Sabbath is to him a day of
retribution. It is the awful day when his ears are washed and touseled
about; when his eyes are punched out by the towelled but unsparing
hand of a Christian mother; when his shoes are put back on him for a
day, and when, with a neck encircled by a collar starched to maddening
stiffness, and with a pocket handkerchief the consistency of pasteboard,
he is sent to the place of punishment. I have read many beautiful poems
about the sweet quiet of the Sabbath, but few of the poets have given
the right solution of it. It is because all over the civilized world
on that day, millions of Boys have been captured and corraled in Sunday
schools. The very church bells understand it, and in the early hours
ring out triumphantly, "Got-'em-in-here! Got-'em-in-here!"
* * * * *
Of course, as we move on through this alternately delightful and
disagreeable world, we must be brought face to face with bores of many
varieties. Setting aside that pest, the egotist, for whom there can
be no excuse, I should like to mention the man or woman who conceives
that the way to talk about books is to deal with the acts and characters
instead of what they say. It seems to me that it is just one of the
modes, if I may call it that, of talking literature that is little
better than no mode at all. It is a rare thing to meet with even the
most modern work--I am speaking of fiction--by a fairly successful
writer, that does not contain some utterance to arouse thought and
challenge us to mental debate. The acts must of necessity be commonplace
from familiarity, for man has behaved himself for a million of years
from the same motives and only varied his manner with the advancing
material circumstances which surrounded him. But his thoughts are not
obliged to be commonplace. The thoughts of men are marching in ever
moving procession towards the Light, and as each one emerges from the
darkness it catches on its forehead a ray which transforms it. It is
these that are to be discussed when we talk about books, and not the
mere acts of the actors therein. What, as a matter of conversation,
is the suicide of Dido, compared with the fine lines in which she so
touchingly summarizes what her life would have been had the false
AEneas never seen her? I lately heard two exceptionally intelligent
young people discussing the novel--Put Yourself in His Place--which
though a very second rate work was written with a very first rate
purpose. Their criticism and discussion was confined wholly to the
action of the characters and they seemed to have thought the purpose
of no account compared with the plot and love-making. And it is not
young people alone who are given to this skimming process. I have known
people who really deserved the title of readers, to find their chief
if not their only criticism in the decision of how well this or that
character was drawn, and what surprises the plot contained; while as
to the thoughts, good or bad, old or novel, the critics seemed to be
oblivious. If we expect really to improve ourselves by books--still
I am speaking of fiction--we should try to remember and afterwards
discuss the thoughts they contained and which we found in the mouths
of the characters or in the comments of the author. There has never
been in my recollection a time when the fiction of the day was more
completely abreast of the advancing thought of the world, or in which
it teemed with more new and practical views logically connected with
passing events and new situations. It is when, closing the book, we
take away with us those seeds and subject them to the attrition of
discussion, which wears off the pollen, that we arrive at, possibly,
a new and valuable thought which may deserve the name of knowledge.
* * * * *
"It seems to me your observations are nothing but opinions," said Mrs.
Boyzy to me the other evening. She called it o-pin-ions. Women have
an art of expressing contempt by syllabic emphasis that men never
acquire. It is their failure to accomplish this that induces men to
substitute profanity. Nevertheless, as that excellent woman remarked,
the things I say in these papers are for the most part opinions. But
what of that; what moves the world but opinions--what has moved it up
to where it is now, but opinions? Where would the world be if it were
not for new opinions; where would men be? Suppose every public man
clung to precedents in public affairs; every politician pinned his
faith on his party policy, and every preacher planted himself on
orthodoxy--all with a determination to go no further. The world would
come to a standstill. There would be no progress. Opinions are the
lever that works the world. Precedents become mouldy, politicians
change with the times, and creeds advance with the public thought.
What do we care what a man thought two hundred years ago, when we have
what a man thinks to-day? What is to us the policy of a political party
when the moss has commenced to grow over it. Who would attempt to
enforce in this day the medieval creeds and religious practices and
church government? What are we put here for, if it is not to learn,
every year, every day, every hour if we can. And of what use is all
this learning if we are not to advance by means of it? And how could
we move a step if we did not tell our neighbor what we think we have
learned--that is, tell him our opinions. I say to you, Madam (and I
say it the more freely that she is out of hearing), that opinions rule
the world, and while it may be possible that mine do not rule my own
household, it impairs their value no more than imprisonment and
persecution did those of other philosophers in the past. An opinion
is a valuable thing--in its information if it is true, in the mental
exercise it gives in combating it, if it is error, and in any event
as a feather that indicates which way the wind is blowing--in what
direction the blind mole of man's finite judgment is groping around
its prison in search of an outlet to the infinite. And that is true,
Madam, whether you call them opinions, or o-pin-ions!