phrase "for a day." So we, the followers of the latest mode and mood,
are, it would seem, the true ephemera, and the fools who defy the local
custom are immortal. The fool is merely an anachronism. All inventors,
most poets, and some statesmen have been honoured with the title, since
we laugh chiefly at what we do not understand. There are more synonyms
for "fool" than for any other word in the language!
So we must take our chances and smile at all and sundry, at men of one
idea, hobby riders, cranks, _poseurs_, managing mammas and antic youths,
blushing brides and fond parents, bounders, pedants, bigots and hens
with their heads cut off. Laugh at them, the character parts in the
comedy of life, for the show is amusing, but be not resentful if you
find the privilege of laughing is a common right, and you in your turn
become a victim. For, strange as it may seem, many of these actors may
be so foolish as to think you the fool yourself!
*Absolute Age*
When I was a child, I invented a game so simple and so passive, that its
enjoyment was permitted even on the rigorous Sundays of my youth. Upon
a slate I ruled vertical columns, and at the head of these I wrote:
"Men, women, boys, girls, babies, horses, dogs." Then, seated at a
window commanding the street, I made note of the passers-by, and as fast
as they appeared in sight I made a mark for each in the appropriate
column. The compilation of this petty census was a pleasing pastime,
and, moreover, it seemed to me that my categories were obviously
complete. There were, in my world, but men and women, boys, girls and
babies--what else, indeed?
But this primary classification of sex and years did not satisfy me
long, and I discovered that my system must be amended if I would
segregate--mentally now--the various types I encountered. There were,
for instance, good persons and bad ones, men educated and ignorant, rich
and poor, and I superimposed upon my first list one after another of
these modifying conditions. But with a larger view of life these crude
distinctions overlapped and became confused, and I saw that the whole
system was but a rude makeshift.
Yet until I could pigeon-hole a new acquaintance in my own mind and put
him with others of his kind I was never quite satisfied. Up to a certain
stage in development, what we are most struck with is the difference
between persons, but after the first intellectual climacteric we begin
to see resemblances, invisible before, that knit men of different aspect
together; and, that game of synthesis once begun, we must play it till
we die. Every new acquaintance is an element of our experience--a new
fact refuting or corroborating our theory of life, and, though we often
may put the case into a separate compartment and label the specimen
"unique," before long we shall probably have to reconsider the whole
collection and devise a new system of arrangement for the complex
characteristics of human nature.
But what analysis can we adopt which shall prove universally
satisfactory? If we rank men according to mental, moral or spiritual
attributes, one quality is sure to contradict or affect the other, and
it is hard to decide which trait is paramount. Friendship is dependent
upon none of these things, and yet in our affections we recognize,
almost unconsciously, grades and qualities of attraction and kinship.
Of a bunch of letters at our breakfast plate, we are sure to open a
special one first or last, as the expectation of pleasure may decide.
We accept this nearness, this intimate relationship, without reasoning;
it is manifested in the first flash of recognition of the handwriting,
at sight of a photograph, at the sound of a voice or a name. Some are
indubitably of our own clan, and others, however their charm, or a
temporary passion, may blind us for a time, are foreigners, and speak
another language of the emotions. There are invisible groups of souls,
mysteriously related, and the tie is indissoluble.
So I have come to adopt as the final classification what, for want of a
better term, I must call Absolute Age--age or condition, that is, not
relative, not dependent upon the year of one's birth. No one, surely,
has failed to observe children who seem to be older than their parents
in possibility of development. One knows that in a few years this child
will have caught up to and passed his father or mother in soundness of
judgment, in a sense of the relative importance of things, in the power
to distinguish sham, convention and prejudice from things of vital
import. This child is older in point of Absolute Age. When his soul
has served its juvenile apprenticeship in the world of the senses he
shall understand truths his parents never knew.
This capacity for comprehending life does not seem to be dependent upon
actual definite experience with the world. The villager may have this
hidden wisdom as clearly as the man who has seen and done, who has
fought, loved and travelled far and well. The mystics hold that we have
all lived before, and that some have profited by their experiences in
former lives and have attained a fairer conception of the very truth.
But, though this illustrates what is meant by the term Absolute Age, it
is by no means necessary to accept such an explanation of the effects we
perceive. It is enough that we can definitely classify our friends by
their emotions and desires, and by their point of view on life. In
other words, some are philosophers and some are not. And even the
philosophers are of varying sects. Some have a keen, childlike
enthusiasm for the more obvious forms of excitement, for all that is new
and strange and marvellous, while others are incapable of being shocked,
surprised or embarrassed--they have poise, and prefer the part of
observer to that of actor in the game of life.
And yet, too, there is a simplicity which comes from a greater Absolute
Age, a relish for real things that persists with enthusiasm. It is by
this simplicity one may distinguish the cult from those that are merely
_blase_ or worldly wise. The joy in the taste of the fresh apple under
the tongue, or in the abandon of the child at play, in the strength of
youth and the grace of women,--this is a joy that does not fade; no, not
even for those who would not trouble to go to the window if the king
rode by! As a man can learn much by travel without losing his capacity
for enjoying his native town, so one can enjoy life intellectually to
the utmost without ever losing one's grasp on one's self, without being
intoxicated by excitement or blinded by egoism, and yet feel still the
clean, sane joys of youth to the last.
We have come to our Absolute Age by different paths. If we are of the
same status, you and I, you may have learned one lesson and I another,
yet the sum of our experience is the same. We are akin spiritually,
although we have not had the same process of development. You, perhaps,
have fought down hate and I have conquered dishonesty, but we are calmer
and wiser, we think, than those whom we smile at quietly when we view
their eagerness for things that no longer concern us. We recognize,
too, that there are others to whose attainments our own powers are
infantile. But in either case the superiority is neither mental nor
moral nor spiritual--it is that mysterious inherent quality we call
"caste."
*The Manual Blessing*
Surely if there is one sharp, active sensation that, in this changeful
life of ours, we never tire of, never outgrow, it is in the satisfaction
of creative manual work. There is a conservation of pleasure as there
is a conservation of energy, and our taste is being continually
transmuted and evolved. One by one we outlive the joys of youth, the
delights of physical exercise, the zest of travel, the beatitude of
emotion, the singing raptures of love, passing from each to a more
mature appeal, a more refined appetite, a subtler demand of the
intellect or of the spirit. The familiar games lose their savour, the
dance gives way to the drama, travel to the calmer investigation of
homely miracles. We tire of seeing and begin to read, feasting
peacefully at the banquet of the arts that other men have spread. This
is, for many of us, what age means--a giving up of active for passive
pleasures when the old games lose their charm.
But the joy of creation does not fade, for in that lies our divinity and
our claim to eternity. Each new product arouses the same thrill, the
same spiritual excitement, the same pride of victory, and yet, strangely
enough, though we think we work only for the final notch of
accomplishment, it is not the completion but the construction that holds
us entranced. Not the last stroke, but every stroke brings victory! It
is like the climbing of a mountain. Do we endure the toil merely for
the sake of the view at the summit? No, but for the primitive passion
of conflict, the inch-by-inch fight against odds, the heaping of
endeavour on endeavour, the continual measuring of what has been done
with what remains to do. The finishing climax is but the exclamation
point at the end of the sentence--most of the sensation has been used up
before we come to the full stop, and that point serves but to sum up our
emotion in a visible emblem of success.
Many of us believe we are debarred from the exercise of this divine
birthright, the joy of creation. We have neither talent nor genius--not
even that variety which consists in the ability to take infinite pains.
Are we not mistaken in this? I think we may each have our share of the
immortal stimulus.
To understand this, we must go back and back in the history of the race,
and there we shall find that this satisfaction, this sane and virile
delight in construction, was possible to the meanest member of the
tribe. Its enjoyment came chiefly in the exercise of a laborious
persistency in little things. The combination or addition of the
simplest elements achieved a positive pleasurable result. The neolithic
man chipped and chipped at his flint until the arrow-head was perfected,
and his joy, had he been able to analyze it, was not so much in the last
stroke as in every stroke. Not so much that he had himself with his own
hands made something, as that he had been making something of use and
beauty, and the possibility of that joy abiding with him as long as he
lived. The makers of ancient pottery repeated the same shapes and
designs, or, if their fancy soared, dared new inventions, but the
satisfaction was in the doing. The carvers and joiners of the Middle
Ages worked as amateurs in cottage and hovel, and in their work lay
their content; no tyranny could wrest from them this well-spring of
pleasure. Old age could but weaken the hand; I doubt if it could tame
the immemorial joy of creation.
We cannot all be professional mechanics, for the division of labour has
cast our lot more and more with the workers in intellectual pursuits.
But we might make handicraft an avocation, if not a vocation, and that
regimen would help our digestion, perhaps, more than pepsin or a course
of the German baths. Were I a physician I should often recommend the
craft cure--a panacea for dyspepsia, ennui and nostalgia.
Here is my modern health resort, my sanitorium for these most desperate
of diseases; a little hamlet of shops and tents on the foothills of the
Coast Range in California, where as you work you can look across a green
valley to the blue Pacific. Here in this new land nature calls fondly
to your soul, and you may turn to the primitive delights of living and
taste the tang of the dawn of civilization, fresh and wholesome as a
wild berry.
Here, squatting on the bare sun-parched ground, with an Indian blanket
over his shoulders, is a corpulent banker with a flint hammer battering
a water-worn boulder. Thus, less than a hundred years ago, the Temecula
Indians hollowed out their stone mortars on this very mesa. Thus they
spent happy days, slept like bears, and were up with the birds, each
morn a day younger than yesterday. In this lodge of deerskins, where
the ground is spread with yellow poppies, sits an ex-secretary of
legation, who has known everything, seen everything, done everything but
this--to cut with a knife of shell strange patterns upon a circular horn
gorget. Finished, his wife might wear it with pride at the Court of St.
James, yet it is but the reproduction of a prehistoric ornament, its
figures smeared with ochre, cobalt and vermilion, and inlaid with lumps
of virgin copper by the mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley. In
this open shelter of bamboo, a trysting-place for meadow-larks and
song-sparrows, lies stretched upon the ground an East India
warehouseman, all his gout and lumbago forgotten in the rapturous
delight of printing a pattern of checquered stripes with a carved wooden
block upon a sheet of tapa which he himself--unaided, mind you--has
pounded from the fibrous bark of the paper mulberry. His strenuous
daughter, once world-worn and frozen, has left Nietsche, Brahms, and the
cult of the symbolists, to sit cross-legged and weave the woolly zigzags
of a Navajo blanket. It is the first thing she has made with her ten
fingers since she baked mud pies in the sun! Had she a scrap of mirror
in her bungalow she could now face it without mortification. An
open-air hand-loom is good for the complexion.
But you need not journey to California. Rather make a pilgrimage to
your own south attic. If you do but construct cardboard model houses
with isinglass windows in your breakfast-room, you will perhaps find
that more diverting than collecting cameos or first editions. If you
can only compile a concordance to _Alice in Wonderland_ you may achieve
a hygienic and rejuvenative distraction. Can you cut, stamp, gild,
paint, lacquer and emboss a leather belt? Can you hammer jewelry out of
soft virgin silver? No? But you could, though, if you tried! Can you
forget the impositions of convention in the rapt glow of pride in sawing
and nailing together a wooden box? No matter how small it might be, how
leaky of joint or loose of cover, it would hold all your worries!
*The Deserted Island*
A friend of mine is curiously hampered by a limitation precluding him
from association with any one conversant with the details of the
manufacture of cold-drawn wire. To show that this self-imposed
abstinence may indicate a most charming devotion to an ideal, rarely
shown by the commonplace, is the object of this thesis, and that, too,
despite the fact that an indiscriminating extension of the same
principle would lead the radical to eschew the society of most of his
acquaintances, as well as bar out the whole domain of didactic
literature.
When the day is done, and that entrancing hour is come for which some
spend many of their waking hours in anticipation, to those blessed with
fancy, the curtain of the dark arises, and within the theatre of the
Night are played strange comedies. To a select performance I invite all
uninitiated who have never enjoyed the drama of the Deserted Island--the
perfect and satisfactory employment for the minutes that elapse after
retiring and before the anchor is weighed and the voyage begun upon the
Sea of Dreams.
There are undoubtedly more than I am aware of who are happy enough to
maintain deserted islands of their own--many more, perhaps, than would
confess to the possession. To some the history may be well under way;
they have long since discovered their island, and many improvements have
already been successfully completed. Others, more adventurous,
handicapped by stricter limitations and more meagre outfit, are still
struggling with the primal demands of food and shelter. But to those
whose imaginations have never put so far out to sea, and would welcome
this modest diversion, I advise an expedition of discovery and
exploration this very night. You have but to go to bed, close your
eyes, and after a few preliminaries you are there!
Authorities differ as to the allowable equipment for the occupancy of
the sequestered territory. I myself hold that it is manifestly unfair
to be provided with tools of any kind; to have a knife, now, I would
call cheating. Surely the only legitimate beginning is to be vomited
upon the beach stark naked from the sea, after some fearsome shipwreck
in mid-ocean. Then, after years of occupancy, a man might taste the
pride of his own resources, unfettered by any legacy inherited from
civilization. Settle this point as you may, when the conditions of the
game are once understood, the whole history of Science is to be
re-enacted.
I have a friend who arrived upon the scene in an open boat containing a
keg of water, a crowbar, a pruning-knife, a red silk handkerchief and a
woman's petticoat; and with these promiscuous accessories has, in the
course of years, transformed the place, which now boasts a stone castle,
entirely inhabitable. His island is about two miles long and a
half-mile wide--much too narrow for comfort, I assert; the proportions
should be about five miles by three, with one dominant hill from which
the whole territory may be surveyed.
But the owner of the other island--he of the cold-drawn wire--boldly
asserts his right to a half-dozen labourers, presumably natives, and
with this force at his disposal he has done wonders with his fief.
Glass has been manufactured, fabrics woven, ore smelted and fine roads
constructed, so that there now remains nothing to be desired but
bicycles upon which he and his slaves may traverse the highways. But in
vain his unskilled assistants look to him for advice; rack his wits as
he may, he can devise no adequate system of making cold-drawn wire, and
he is beginning to lose caste with his followers.
Now at first sight one might think it necessary for him only to consult
an encyclopedia, or to visit on iron mill, yet this course is strictly
barred out by the rules of the game, which compels one to use only such
information as comes naturally to hand--for one is likely to be cast
ashore upon a desert island at any moment, and it is then too late for
the research and education that has been before neglected. With any
ingenious fellow who has his own amateur ideas on the subject, one may,
of course, talk freely; for he may represent one of the more intelligent
of the natives; but all they who really know whereof they speak are to
be avoided. So the problem of the cold-drawn wire is still unsolved.
I know of an artist, who, free on this enchanted spot, has turned his
energies to those diverting pursuits for which his studio leaves no
time, and he builds gigantic rock mosaics on the cliffs, selecting from
the many coloured boulders on the beach. Luxuries are his only
necessities even in his daily life, and the enormity of his trifling on
this holiday playground is a thing to wonder at. His art, so used to a
censorship of Nature, in his professional mimicries, here goes boldly
forth and so mends, prunes and patches the aspect of his island, that
the place is now, he says, absolutely perfect; a consummation not
altogether discreditable to a nude, near-sighted man, whose eye-glasses
were washed off before he arrived on the spot!
But, taking the situation seriously, what will he be in the years to
come? By what gradations shall the lonely artist sink to low and lower
levels, abandoned by the stimulus of the outer world, the need for
advance, and the struggle for recognition? How soon would he lose the
desire to render, in the medium at hand, the lovely forms of nature
about him, the subtle tones of the earth and air, lapsing by stages into
ever cruder forms of expression, till the whole history of his
development had been reversed, and he became content with rude squares,
triangles and circles for his patterns, the barbarous effigies of the
human form, and the primary colours that satisfy the savage?
And the sense of humour, too--that universal solvent of all our
miseries, the oil that lubricates the cumbrous machinery of life--how
soon would that go? Is it not, in the last analysis, dependent upon the
by-play of the social relationship of men? The inconsistencies of our
fellows must be first noticed before we can get the reflected light of
ridicule upon our own grotesque actions. It would soon be lost in such
a sojourn, our impatience would have no foil, we would take ourselves
more and more seriously until the end came upon that day when we had at
last forgotten how to laugh.
But, after all, as this text of the hypothetical deserted island is
better fitted for a romance than for a sermon, we may leave such
forebodings and trace out only the rising curve of improvement. And so,
too, interesting as it might be to experience, we may leave aside the
moral speculations incident to the discussion of the case where the
place becomes occupied by a man and a woman. The possibilities of a
shipwreck in company are not for such a brief memoir as this; they offer
consideration too intimate for these discreet pages, and are best left
to the exclusion of a private audience.
But choose your company carefully, I entreat you, if you are not soberly
minded to be shipwrecked alone. I know of persons with whom, were I cast
ashore, there could be no end not tragic, albeit these are highly
respectable and praiseworthy individuals, who never did any harm except
in that trick of manner by which we recognize the bore. I am often
inclined to test the merits of others by mentally permitting them a
short visit to my island, but the hazard is too great, and the thought
of the possibility of their footprints upon the sand unnerves me.
Yet, to a distant islet of this fantastic archipelago I seriously
consider consigning certain impossible acquaintances, absolutely
intolerable personalities, whose probable fate, forced to endure each
other's society, interests me beyond words. Upon one side of this
far-away retreat rises a steep cliff overhanging the sea, and here I
behold in imagination one after another of these marooned unfortunates
pushed headlong over the slope, as, unable to support the society of his
companions, each has in turn, by some stratagem, lured his hated
accomplice in misery to the summit of the bluff.
But of one island I have not yet spoken. I can get no description of it
save that it lies sleeping in the summer sun, washed by the sapphire
tides and fanned by the cool south winds, its olive slopes rising softly
from the beach, marked by a grove of fruit trees at the crest. More the
owner will not tell, for Celestine says there is no use for a deserted
island after it is charted; but by these signs I shall know the place,
and my trees are felled and my sails are plaited that shall yet bear me
over towards the southwest!
*The Sense of Humour*
Much as one may look through the small end of a telescope and find an
unique and intrinsic charm in the spectacle there offered, so to certain
eyes the whole visible universe is humorous. From the apparition of
this dignified little ball, rolling soberly through the starry field of
the firmament, to the unwarrantable gravity of a neighbour's straw hat,
macrocosm and microcosm may minister to the merriment of man. There is
more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in the philosophy of the
Realist.
It is one attribute of a man of parts that he shall have, in his mental
vision, what corresponds to the "accommodation" of his eye, a
flexibility of observation that enables him to adapt his mind to the
focus of humour. Myopia and strabismus we know; the dullard can point
their analogies in the mental optics, but for this other misunderstood
function we have no name; and yet, failing that, we have dignified it as
a sense apart--the sense of humour. But no form of lens has been
discovered to correct its aberration and transfer the message in
pleasurable terms to the lagging brain; and, unless we attempt hypnotism
as a last resort, the prosiest must go purblind for life, missing all
but the baldest jokes of existence.