THE MODERN MEDICINE MAN

Medicine, like other natural phenomena tends to the cyclic. Having

passed safely through the drug period of evolution, both allopathic and

homeopathic, into the no-drug state of so-called "preventive medicine"

which has nothing to do with medicine as the word is commonly

understood, this ancient mystery of the cure of bodies is now reunited

to its equally ancient but long alienated mate the cure of souls, and

this bewildered generation is confronted with the amazing spectacle of

the lion of science and the lamb of religion lying down together.

Whether the ultimate resting place of the lamb will be inside the lion

is not yet disclosed to the anxious and inquiring mind. Again the priest

and the physician are combined in one person, and we see before us the

modern counterpart of the antique medicine man who exorcised the devils

that possessed and tormented the soul and the body, and by sorcery and

incantations treated impartially diseases of the spirit and of the

flesh. Again the accepted cure for blindness is to "go and sin no more."

It is especially that borderland where soul and body meet and fuse in

what a recent treatise on the diseases of the nervous system calls "the

psychic or symbolic system" that the modern medicine man takes as his

province. In this No Man's Land he is master of all he surveys, and his

sextant comprises the universe in its angle.

We are prone to think of diseases of the mind as a specialty of modern

life. But the briefest review of history would indicate that these

symptoms of maladjustment to the environment have been evident from the

earliest times. Adam and Eve are said to have developed "paranoiac

delusions of persecution," a kind of _manie a deux_, accompanied by

hallucinations of vision described as "seeing snakes." Their elder son

was afflicted with a "homicidal mania," while the younger was apparently

a case of "constitutional inferiority." Noah was a well recognized

"alcoholic," Job was subject to severe "depressions," Nebuchadnezzar

exhibited "praecox dilapidations of conduct" and Saul was a pronounced

"manic-depressive." The Bible contains many edifying and well worked-out

case histories with prescriptions for the treatment of such

difficulties. It was Isaiah who outlined the newer method when he said,

on the highest authority, "Come now, and let us reason together, saith

the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as

snow."

It was perhaps through dwelling on his own race history and literature

that the newest prophet in Israel, the famous, to some infamous,

Viennese professor, Sigmund Freud, came to invent the latest prophylaxis

for mental disorders, now widely known under the name of psychoanalysis,

at present the best recognized specific for many mental disorders, and

particularly for those orgies and "hang-overs" of the soul, the

"manic-depressive psychosis."

This is the chief of the new designations for one of the old diseases,

the failing reserved for the especially refined and subtle mind, the

form of complex developed most frequently in the most delicate

psychological machinery. This psychosis is the protest of the winged

spirit against the humdrum dead levels of the main-traveled roads, a

near relation to the "hysteric" refuge of the aesthetic nature from the

vulgarities of everyday life, the "praecox" preference for childhood's

happy hour, and the "paranoiac" escape from the banalities of a society

composed too exclusively of well-meaning, friendly but unbearably

tiresome folk. All these phenomena are but the outbreak of the higher

nature, the reaction of the superman, that creature of light and air, to

the dullness and dreariness of this underworld, in which the chrysalis

drags out its drab and worm-like existence before the emergence of the

butterfly.

In view, however, of the stubborn fact that the superman must continue

to exist (unless indeed non-existence is the state preferred) in a world

made up largely of subnormal, or even more deadly normal beings, the

overbred and super-sensitive must seek some form of reconciliation to

the fundamental absurdities that pass for real life, must even submit to

something in the nature of a "cure" for the disease of superevolution,

some esoteric bloodletting process as it were, in order to restrain the

impulse to skip like a lamb in the sun on the hillside, and confine the

gait to an anemic crawl along the narrow path of the commonplace.

Psychoanalysis appears to be the "indicated" treatment for these

adjustment difficulties, and it is the purpose of this article to

suggest to the as yet uninitiated some of the novel features in the

mechanism of this psychotherapy, and to offer a few reflections thereon.

To assume the greater ease of the first person singular, I should

perhaps say in passing, or by way of apology, that if I appear somewhat

unduly and indecently personal in my observations on the new psychology,

it is a habit fastened upon me by a half year of indulgence in an orgy

of such voluble self discussion and analysis as I had previously fondly

fancied to exist only in young ladies' boarding schools. Figure to

yourself, if you can, the inevitable result of conversing about your

"soul," and unburdening all its secrets and reserves in tri-weekly

sessions with an inquisitive stranger! The process is a throw-back to

those unsophisticated days when the Knight of La Mancha and a group of

other romantics, met for the first time by accident in a country inn,

whiled away the long evening in the unrestrained and interminable

narrations of their lives and loves, complacently revealing to one

anothers' sympathetic and, one would imagine, sometimes startled gaze,

the secret springs of their existence.

The psychoanalytic process begins, I may explain, with such a relating

of one's personal history, occupying many hours, and covering all that

one has ever done, said or thought. One starts with reminiscences of the

nursery and the kindergarten, and passes on to a detailed description of

the coloring, height and contour of one's first love. As this, in the

case of a woman, is supposed to be her father, it is necessary to pause

for some time on the aspects of the paternal figure, which affect all

her subsequent emotional reactions, according to the well-known course

of the so-called "Oedipus complex." This is the imposing designation for

the generally observed preference for each other of mothers and sons and

of fathers and daughters, a phenomenon that the new psychologists, who

take the common place with a seriousness! deem worthy of the most

painstaking examination and erudite elucidation. "The root complex" and

"the family romance" are other alluring titles for this parental-filial

relation. This sentiment is supposed to modify all the so-called

"affective" life. If father happens to be tall and thin and blond, then

daughter, having a "fixation" on him, is, for all time to come,

particularly susceptible to the attractions of tall, thin, blond men of

advanced years. The analyst inquires minutely into the shades of

complexion of all the patient's _inamorati_ in a manner that recalls the

familiar "I see a dark man coming over deep water" of the tea-leaves in

the tea-cup stage of one's experience.

After the patient has sternly and heroically resisted the temptation to

invent in the interest of her own self-respect, and also in mitigation

of the ill-concealed contempt of the masculine practitioner for the

paucity of her experience, a few more numerous and more romantic

emotional episodes than have actually been doled out to her by a

penurious fate, and has completed the short and simple annals of her

poverty-stricken heart history, and after the incredulous inquisitor has

become at last convinced that there is indeed nothing more to be told,

this chapter is closed, and then begins the regime of dreams and "free

association."

* * * * *

The interpreting of one's dreams seems to furnish the doctor with a

secret source of amusement that he tries in vain to dissemble, and as

one is only too glad to make up to him in some measure for the hours of

obvious boredom that he has endured while listening to one's _apologia

pro vita sua_, one indulges him by forming the careful habit of grasping

firmly by the tail every elusive dream as it tries to whisk around the

corner of consciousness during one's first waking moments, pulling it

painfully and resistingly back for close and detailed scrutiny, and

laboriously committing to memory and subsequently describing its every

feature and function at the next matinee performance at which one makes

an appearance.

The chastening discovery of the dreamer who relates his dreams to the

professional interpreter is that all that has been carefully withheld

from revelation in the related autobiography, is disclosed with the most

embarrassing crudity, and that secret sins of which one was quite

unconscious are displayed with mortifying clarity. The dream is a

mechanism for letting the cat out of the bag, all kinds of strange cats,

of the existence of which their harborer was often unaware.

Dreams seem to reveal the dreamer as a hypocritical, evasive,

self-deluding coward, unable to face the commonest facts of life, or to

call a spade anything less innocent than a parasol, or even to confront

his own friends and acquaintances, except by forcing them to masquerade

under some so-called "surrogate" form.

My previous personal experience had led me to identify a surrogate as

some kind of judge, but I soon learned that this narrow and technical

meaning must be replaced by the more general signification of

"substitute," though why the word substitute should not be considered

good enough to use in this connection, I never learned. This is but one

of the many examples of the perverse preference of the technicians of

the new science for strange distortions of words with well recognized

and frequently quite different meanings in common parlance. It comes as

somewhat of a shock to the beginner to hear all emotion summarily

classified as "sexual," normal filial or parental affection designated

as "incestuous," friendship as "homosexual," self-respect as

"narcissistic" and the life force or will to power as "the libido."

Soon, however, one becomes as resigned to this strong language as to the

evolutionary hypothesis, and finds it a no more unpalatable thought that

all emotion is derived from sex than that all human beings are descended

from an apelike ancestor. That this common use of the exaggerated

statement leaves no adequate expression for the more intense emotions

fails to disturb a cult that apparently regards all differences of

feeling as of degree rather than of kind.

* * * * *

The narration of dreams puts slight work on the dreamer, and sorely

taxes the mental resources and the ingenuity of the interpreter, but the

real labor, the strenuous and unremitting toil to which the unhappy

victim of this ritual is subjected by a pitiless practitioner is in the

rigors of what goes by the disingenuous name of "free association." This

may sound like some pleasant if not spicy and highly unconventional

pastime, but is in fact and literally a procrustean bed of torture. The

helpless patient is forced to remove her bonnet and shawl and recline

upon a couch with her eyes closed. Her merciless tormentor retires to a

comfortable armchair in a corner of the room. There, because he is out

of sight of the patient, he is supposed, according to the workings of

the mysterious masculine psychology, to be entirely removed from her

consciousness, so that she can concentrate her mind on nothingness, just

as if she were alone by the fireside. Then he starts in with something

like the following initiation of the third degree: "What are your

associations with the word authority?" You are supposed to respond to

this irrelevant inquiry with something like the following idiotic

emanations, "Government--Washington--the President--Mrs.

Wilson--orchids--grandfather's greenhouse," and if you are entirely

resigned to making a fool of yourself, and can abandon yourself to the

spirit of this child's play, this is what you finally learn to do, after

many strenuous efforts to play the game, and the final attainment of a

reasonable self-stultification.

If, however, as is likely to be the case, you are a more or less

feminine person, instinctively unwilling to exhibit your mind in

_deshabille_, and fatuously intent with a persistency worthy of a better

cause on making a good impression on the only person present, you learn

to use these opportunities to tell him everything to your credit that

you can think of, and by carefully working out, preferably in advance, a

chain of passable associations, to present yourself, your character, and

your career in the most favorable light. The wide range of possibilities

in this process that are open to the designing patient seems to be

scarce dreamt of in the philosophy of the gross masculine mind.

* * * * *

This brings me by easy and inevitable stages to the important topic of

the "transference." To the unenlightened this may be defined as the mock

modest and deceptive designation invented by the psychoanalyst for the

more or less ardent affection for himself that he cold-bloodedly sets

out to inspire in his victim. The doctor, for the benefit of his

patient, temporarily transfers to himself and appropriates the devotion

which normally belongs to father, brother, husband, son or lover. To be

sure, it is to remembered that as there is no such word as friendship in

the psychoanalytic vocabulary, an attitude of confidence or admiration

must be represented in terms of a deeper sentiment.

Of course what happens is that the patient mistakes for an attachment of

the heart what is in reality only an intimacy of the mind, because such

an abandon of reserve is indissolubly associated in the feminine mind

with the ties of affection. According to the true Jamesian psychology,

she loves because she confides, instead of confiding because she loves.

How a poor man patient manages can only be surmised, but there are

indications that the knowing of the sex furtively seek the ministrations

of a woman analyst.

* * * * *

Apparently the theory on which all the varied forms of this treatment

are based is that the catharsis of the mind is essential to mental

health, the emptying of all that is in it, the expulsion of dead matter.

The nausea of the soul is relieved like its physical analogue by freeing

it from the undigested matter, the "repressions," that lie so heavily

upon it. The self-contained nature that refrains from spilling over and

strives to maintain itself without recourse to the safety valve of

confidence must in the end unload its burden.

After the destructive process is completed and the ground cleared for

the constructive measures that are to rear the temple of the "_mens sana

in corpore sano_," the heavier half of the work remains to be done; for

the gigantic task to which the practitioner of the new prophylaxis sets

himself is nothing less than the reconstruction of the character of the

patient. Indeed, a recent work on psychoanalysis has for its title _The

Mechanisms of Character Formation_. The conversions that the Rev. Mr.

Sunday and his less notable peers are wont to accomplish in an hour,

these painstaking scientists patiently bring about in from some scores

to some thousands of hours of equally strenuous labor. I am informed

that the cure of the first case of a certain type undertaken by one of

these under-studies of the Eternal, actually consumed two thousand

hours, and that the cure of the specific disease required the entire

reconstruction of the character of the sufferer. Presumably the bill for

"professional services" involved in this beatification was $20,000. One

wonders whether the character that resulted was worth the price. The

consulting room of the psychoanalyst is the new Beauty Parlor where

those dissatisfied with their mental and moral physiognomy may have the

lines of stress and strain smoothed away, and may gain the roses and

lilies of a rejuvenated spiritual complexion. Unhappily I am unable to

speak at length and with authority on this phase of the treatment; for I

am at present only just entering upon the period of metamorphosis. I see

dimly, "as through a glass darkly," my own apotheosis looming ahead, but

the road to that celestial height looks a long and weary and appallingly

expensive journey.

It is the time element that perhaps most impresses and depresses the

student of the new prophylaxis. In a recent paper by a competent

psychiatrist the writer refers as follows to the impracticability of

studying a group of cases in a public hospital on the plan of getting

the patients to understand and explain their own difficulties:

At the rate at which the best of the psychoanalysts work, it

would not be possible properly to study in the course of the

year more than a dozen cases. Furthermore, the results of such

work are of importance purely for the individual, and no

generalization can be drawn therefrom.... Also, no

generalization being possible, it is a matter of piece work;

to study one hundred cases according to this method would

require the efforts of fifteen to twenty psychologists on full

time for many months.

In the opinion of the faithful, Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis,

is to psychiatry what Darwin was to biology, but as Darwin's theory of

evolution required more aeons than the geologists were able to oblige

him with, so Freud's method requires more time than the calendar

affords. Darwin's theory of the variation of species had to be modified

by the theory of mutations or sports. Freud's methods, to be workable,

must be adapted in some way to the indisputable fact that there are only

twenty-four hours in the day, and only three hundred and sixty-five days

in the year.

A careful mathematical calculation of the number of hours required to

cure a psychosis by this new prophylaxis reveals an alarming

disproportion between the minute number of physicians available, and the

incalculable number of patients requiring their ministrations. One of

the most ardent devotees of the new method is a practitioner who,

according to the testimony of a confrere, enters upon his daily

endurance test at 9 A. M. and without any luncheon psychoanalyzes

continuously until 7 P. M. As the ordinary patient is supposed to

require three hours a week of this treatment, for about five months, the

doctor can, by working ten hours a day, treat twenty patients in one

week, or allowing him two months vacation in summer (and he will need

it) handle forty patients in one year. This, alas, is but a drop of

medicine in the bucket of disease, and unless, by some homeopathic

adaptation of the five-hundredth-dilution principle, we can make our

medicine go farther it is only a limited number of the rich and leisure

class who can ever be cured by these new methods. This is the

prostrating situation that confronts the humanitarian--a little group of

healers bravely but hopelessly taking up arms against a sea of mental

troubles.

One cannot help wondering whether such exhaustive thoroughness is really

essential. It seems sometimes to the disillusioned seeker after truth

that the relation of the conscious life history, the revelation of the

unconscious through dreams, the display of the mental processes through

"free association," are but the hocus-pocus devised for keeping up the

conversation between the analyst and the analyzed--a crude, clumsy,

masculine technique for discovering, by somewhat labyrinthine methods,

the essence of the personal quality of an individual. Might not this be

obvious in a few hours of ordinary intercourse to a person of intuition,

practised in the art of plucking the heart out of a mystery, instead of

chopping up the whole anatomy to get at it?

The expenditure of time and effort and money required to gain the occult

ends of what seems like a blind and blundering process, is certainly

colossal. What the patient puts into it is comparatively unimportant. A

fool and his money might as well be parted sooner as later, and the time

of the patient, especially in the state of depression in which he

ordinarily seeks treatment, is worth so little that killing it is as

good a use as any to make of it. But think of the physician--a man of

parts, of much general and special education, who has added to a large

professional equipment the complicated technique of a laborious method

that only a German thoroughness gone stark and staring mad, could

perpetrate on a makeshift world, which, with all its failings, has not

lost its sense of humor or its perception of the relative value of

things mundane, and does still discriminate between time and eternity.

Think of a first rate mind expending itself for hours on end in the

minute scrutiny of some trivial neurotic mentality, probably as like as

two peas to thousands of other equally insignificant particles of matter

that pass for individual organisms.

* * * * *

If indeed the interest in another personality is the essence of the

"cure," one is tempted to ask why these egocentric erotomaniacs should

not derive the same and mutual benefit from interesting themselves in

one another? Why not pair them off, male and female as originally

created, and embark them together on this ark of refuge from the deluge

of the common life in which they are drowning? Let them sit by the hour,

the day, the week, and talk about their "souls," relate to each other's

absorbed attention their life history, interpret each other's dreams,

and join in the freest of "free association." Let the blind lead the

blind, the sick heal the sick, the erotic love the erratic, and silly

soul mate with silly soul, leaving the authentic souls of the doctors to

be saved from stultification, and their talents used for the benefit of

human beings who are really and truly suffering.

But, alas, there seems to be no such easy panacea for mortal ills: for

to attain its ends the process must apparently be presided over by a

superior if not superhuman intelligence. And the patient, if

scientifically or benevolently minded, can take comfort in the thought

that his case is perhaps sufficiently different from any hitherto

handled to enable the investigator to benefit almost as much as the

patient by the experience. Perhaps the months that the biddable patient

who has overcome his "resistances" devotes to cooeperating with the

scientific explorer, may be reduced to weeks in the treatment of the

next like-minded individual who submits himself for treatment by the

more practised practitioner. I recall my despairing comment upon a

doctor's tale of the case that it took two thousand hours to cure, and

the reassuring response that, now that the technique had been worked out

and published, any competent person could turn the trick in from

one-tenth to one-twentieth of the time.

* * * * *

The psychoanalytic approach to mental prophylaxis is perhaps still,

after twenty years of groping progress, in the experimental stage. The

few bold spirits who have braved the ridicule of their conservative

confreres, and left the main travelled roads, are hardy pioneers blazing

trails and treading out paths that will in time be easy traveling. It is

inevitable that in the delicate operations by which these spiritual

sawbones are mastering the mystery of this new art of the vivisection of

the soul, they should sometimes cause pain or even cut in the wrong

place. But they are inspired by a very human sympathy for their

victim-beneficiaries, and are rapidly learning their way about the

spiritual anatomy, and discovering the skillful use of mental

anaesthetics.

The strangest thing about this extraordinary process is that it really

does cure the mind diseased. Where and what, one asks, and continues to

ask, is the nexus between treatment and cure. Has any patient, however

completely recovered, ever found out? Do the practitioners of this

occult ritual know themselves, or have they simply hit on a practical

technique, without a comprehension of a rational philosophical basis for

its major operations? Is this like early groping experiments with

"animal magnetism," or mysterious forms of electricity which brought

results long before an understanding of the reason of their success was

arrived at? However this may be, it still remains true that, judged by

its results, the new method, however dark and devious, must still be

acknowledged to have attained a success, not sporadic and accidental,

but continuous, consistent and increasing, and apparently, though

incomprehensibly, connected as effect to cause with the procedure which

has been sketched, or shall I say caricatured, in the foregoing pages.

"THE PUREST OF HUMAN PLEASURES"

Top-heavy civilization is always righting itself by a side-reach after

the "primitive" and the "elemental." Weary capitalists and professional

men play--expensively--at what when all's said is but a child's game of

ball enhanced by feats of walking. Science gives us the motor; and

slug-a-beds who have hitherto accepted sunrise as an act of faith grow

to be connoisseurs in effects of morning haze and chiaroscuro.

Perhaps, then, there are many others who, like myself, have discovered,

in this year of the travail of humanity, the sober and healing pleasures

of the garden. Of course I had always intended to have a garden

sometime, on the same principle by which I hope to see Japan, to read

the Old Testament in Hebrew (having first mastered a dozen other

languages more immediately relevant to my business), to have my twilight

stage of knowledge regarding the material universe dispelled by the

blinding light of modern discovery. I had even used the planning of this

garden, with its companion brook, grove, and lawn, as a lure for sleep.

But that was a paradise for the eye alone; and in my heathen blindness I

dreamed that the joy of the garden was in the beholding. Most pityingly

I look back upon that time of ignorance. Confess, fellow amateurs, is

not the joy in the making? Even harvesting, the end for which the garden

was made, yields the gardener himself a crasser pleasure, as compared

with the stirring of the earth, laying down seeds in a row like a string

of matched stones, and most of all watching the young plants, obedient

to his design, prick through the earth and advance from seed-leaf to

bushiness or stateliness, from foliage to flower. To gather the fruits

of your labor justifies your enterprise, but it is something like

receiving royalties for a work of art born in a flash of inspiration. To

see the delicate green shoots, perfect in their vague promise, and

innocent of the blights, distortions, and frustrations that may overtake

them later on, stretching up and unfolding where the other day there was

only black earth, is akin to the first vision of some great creative

idea, before one meets its penalty in hours of toil and cheated hope.

There is even a tinge of guilt in our pleasure; we have digressed, in

the name of civic duty, from our lawful callings, considering that we

made some sacrifice of time or strength, and our virtue has turned into

an indulgence.

One of my first discoveries (after the simplest rudiments of the art I

essayed to practise) was that of all topics on the lips of men the

garden is the most conversable, the most fraternal. Hitherto,

observation had led me to suppose children and rheumatism the most

universal of interests. Having neither myself, I have been cut off from

that fluent intercourse upon first steps and first words, adenoids,

preventive dentistry, potatoes carried in the pocket, baths of hot

brine, and the proportion of protein in the diet, which makes strangers

or friends akin. There was always the weather; but--unless one has a

garden, as sensitive as a poet to every nuance of sun or

atmosphere--talk of the weather is a mere subterfuge, a symbol of our

inarticulateness and awkward shyness masking our human yearning to know

our fellows and to wish them well. The garden, as a subject of

discourse, combines all the pretext offered by the weather to hint our

good will without violating our shyness; all the diversity and perpetual

surprise of a child's development; all the right to condole with

misfortune and to be agreeably officious about remedies enjoyed by those

who encounter the rheumatic; all the delight of professional

note-comparing known to invalids, cooks, and pedagogues. To appear in my

garden, equipped with sun-hat and hoe, was, I found, to be hail-fellowed

by every condition of men--pickaninnies, delivery-men, professors,

elegants and inelegants, experts and inexperts. My acquaintanceship

among my neighbors grew like Jonah's gourd. "Do you mind my asking what

that line of white strips is for?" "To warn the English sparrows off my

pea-vines."--"Would you like some young cabbage-plants?"--"Your corn is

lookin' fine!" Common interests were visible and inexhaustible.

* * * * *

Other sociabilities also I have found in the garden. We prate a good

deal of "companionship with nature," and go out fussily to seek it, with

camera, bird-book, field-glasses, and expensive camping gear. In the

garden one loses all this self-consciousness. Instead of personifying

nature, and offering her the compliment of man's society, one sinks into

one's place as a piece of nature. The catbird spluttering joyous music

at me, almost forgetting to be afraid; the cardinal that looks down where

I stand tossing off a magnificent plume of spray from my watering-pot,

and whistles, "We-e-ell! Who'd-have-thought-to-see-you-keeping-at-it?"

and I myself, turning to my own uses the perpetual need of life to renew

itself, to evolve out of seed and bulb new seeds and bulbs, which shall

give birth in time to other seeds and bulbs--we are all part of the same

process.

With our Little Brother the Robin I am approaching intimacy. It is

pleasant to see him assume, with almost human egotism, that the worms I

turn up, the strings I plant by, the stakes I drive, are special

providences for himself. Yet I have never quite won his confidence. I

have often longed to speak to him, explaining that there are worms

enough for us both, and how easy I find it to scatter a few extra

strings for his nest-building; I have longed to reassure the wild doves

who run about on their pretty pink feet in the long grass near the

garden, and at my approach fly away with a protesting soft

"chitter-chitter-chitter." I realize afresh, as I have often realized in

watching people coax squirrels to eat from their hands, or children

lavishing affection on brainless hens and rabbits, that if there had

been no Saint Francis, it behooved mankind to invent him. On the other

hand, the gardener, a fighter in the struggle for food, finds the

impartial views of the dilettante asking for "companionship with nature"

quite unthinkable. The wild rabbit, which only last winter I thought an

engaging creature, has not changed the sleekness of his brown coat, his

funny little white tuft of tail, or his wavelike movements; but he has

become repulsive to me.

A whole new set of values, in fact, takes possession of mind and senses.

One comes to like the writhings of the angle worms in the muck, knowing

that they do the gardener service. Various sights and contacts, once

offensive, being now considered not simply in themselves, but in

relation to our purposes, become indifferent or actually pleasurable.

Even whiffs of fertilizer, if suggestive merely, give an agreeable sense

that the work is going forward. And what an infinite gulf between "dirt"

and "soil"! There lies between a whole initiation into secrets chemical

and biological. Once I passed by garden tracts with undistinguishing

eyes. Now to see them stifled with weeds, or to see the earth stiff and

lumpy, affects me like walking in New York slums, or like a hideous

grouping of colors; to see the earth mellow and finely tilled is

satisfying, like a good chord in music, or like a firm strong drawing.

Digging, planting, transplanting, watching the sky, I have come face to

face with the meaning of words I have known all my life, in the dim way

we know most things outside our own importunate concerns. "Except a corn

of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone." It is one

thing to understand this saying botanically, and another to see it

exemplified when you are breathlessly awaiting the result. "An enemy

hath done this!" I cried when the wild rabbit stripped my young

bean-plants, or when some great dog made his bed in my onion-patch. All

sorts of images, from parable, poem, and story, re-awake in my mind with

a morning freshness and brightness. And in my turn I have enacted, or

experienced, many a little apologue. For example, I discover that plants

grown in over-shaded spots fall victim no less surely to what sun they

get, on scorching days, than those quite unprotected. Here are the

facts; the moralist may make of them what he will.

* * * * *

What would any art be without its disappointments and anxieties, its

hours of depression that measure the worth of the goal striven for? The

amateur gardener has his share. I pass over in forgiving silence--almost

silence--the haughty fashion in which the masters of the craft,

professing to offer information, so give as to withhold. Your

professional is a thorough classicist; "nothing too much" his motto.

Enough, and not too much, whether it be vanilla in the cookies, exercise

for the invalid, "corroborative detail" in the narrative, or sunshine,

water, fertilizer, depth of earth, mulching for your plants. And this

all-important but inscrutable rule is the despair of every amateur. A

grievance perhaps more personal to myself has been the unnatural

behavior enjoined on me toward seedlings of my own sowing, my own

cosseting. In a sense, I had brought them into the world, and now I was

told some of them must be done away with, that the rest might thrive! As

I edged along the rows, unhappily choosing, among all the pretty

youngsters, the victims for the sacrifice, I reminded myself of Catiline

('tis consoling, at last to have a use for one's education); _notat et

designat oculis ad caedem unumquemque_. Sometimes my human instinct to

value every individual and to lavish care on the weak has got the better

of me. I do not dwell on the experiments to which I have resorted; but

some of them, in spite of the doctrinaires, were triumphs! On the other

hand, I have bitterly resented deformities and discolorations in my

nursery. For the first time in my life I understand how the Spartans

could expose for death infants blemished in mind or body. I understand

what fierce parental pride is at the bottom of many a father's or

mother's blindness to faults and commonplaceness.

On every side I hear from fellow-enthusiasts detailed schemes for next

year's garden, vows of perpetual gardendom. I do not echo them. I have

been initiated; a certain bond with my kind is mine henceforth. But the

purest of human pleasures, as Bacon called it, is likewise the most

tyrannous. Other joys may be caught up in Gideon's fashion, while one

marches on one's way. Once the garden possesses you, it leaves no room

for anything beside. The garden-seat of Adam and Eve has been

universally regretted. But what had they to do except name the

creatures, dig, sow, and reap? They did not have to pay their way with

money, nor answer letters, nor read the newspapers, nor vote, nor keep

track of the bacterial count in the milk they drank, nor study past

history in order to interpret the present, nor even to learn the science

of horticulture.