personality:--that something peculiarly our own which, in the words of
Petrarch, ‘it is both easier and wiser to cultivate and to correct than
to alter;’ that something within us which, in the words of Emerson,
‘accepts and disposes of impressions after a native, individual law.’
We grow in wisdom as we grow in the knowledge of such inner laws.
They are fundamental and inevitable. They control mental life and are
not to be controlled save through much self-realization. Is a man
instinctively active, or does he love contemplation and the forsaking
of works? Is he single-minded, identified with his occupation, or does
he work merely for bread and live, for himself alone, in some dear
avocation? The single-minded may look forward to the perfection that
comes from practice--and toward becoming subdued to what he works in.
Hence Charles Lamb on the melancholy of tailors and Dr. Robertson
Nicoll on Matthew Arnold as ever the inspector of schools. Other men
show their spontaneity and genuineness in their avocations--witness
Michael Angelo’s sonnets and Victor Hugo’s sketches. Little intentional
literature has charmed the world like the amateur quatrains of Omar the
astronomer, translated by Fitzgerald the dilettante.
“Is a man an idealist or a realist? Let him ponder Don Quixote’s
impracticality and Sancho Panza’s aimlessness, following inner impulse
or outward stimulus, denying the world or losing his own soul. Let
him ponder, moreover, Rembrandt’s struggle to serve both at the same
time. The pitfalls of the realist are proverbial, but ideals, also, may
be dangerous, through mistaken selection, partial generalization, or
imperfect adjustment to the facts in hand.
“What, again, are our innate or acquired interests and desires? Does
their vision of the future help or hinder our realization of the
present? Do we aspire after the impossible, expecting precision or
clarity, brevity or completeness, where they cannot or should not be?
Do we apprehend the unlikely? ‘If anything external vexes you,’ says
Marcus Aurelius, ‘take notice that it is not the thing which disturbs
you, but your notion about it, which notion you may dismiss at once
if you please.’ Disappointment, says Dr. Johnson, ‘you may easily
compensate by enjoining yourself some particular study, or opening
some new avenue to information.’ If we cannot attain, like Lamb, to
hissing our failures, let us, like La Motte, retire to a Trappist
monastery, and drown consciousness in study. Let us not expect ideal
conditions--Spencer and Huxley could work but three hours a day. Let us
look, if necessary, to our compensations. Napoleon had satisfactions
in spite of his standing forty-second at military school. Darwin’s
inability to master languages and his loss of pleasure in poetry,
painting, music, and natural scenery were more than made up for. Let us
hope for no ‘simple, plausible, easy solution of life that will free
us from all responsibility;’ but endeavor to apprehend and ennoble our
practical religion, that scale of values according to which we spend
our hoard of life.
“Mental action varies with individuals, yet Emerson’s general statement
is true--‘thought is a kind of reception uncontrolled by will; we can
only open our senses and clear away obstructions; suddenly thought
engages us; afterward we remember the process and its results.’
Attention, however, may be led, if not driven; sensibility may become
dirigible; it is possible to learn how to keep a fresh eye. Observation
of our reactions will make possible a wise selection among stimuli; so
Gray learned to seek music, Darwin to avoid it, and many have come to
some conscious relation between reading and writing. Experience will
teach us how to free the mind from haunting suggestions by fixing and
holding their values; how to recollect emotion in tranquillity; how to
begin work slowly, and steadily, and then accelerate; how to value the
process as well as the product of acquisition. We may learn, through
the slowness of accumulation, that we retain only what we use, that a
bad memory may be the best, because selective, that even leisure may
be well employed. ‘Whatever I do or do not do,’ said Sainte-Beuve, ‘I
cease not to learn from the book of life.’ Lope de Vega, sailing with
the Armada, sacrificed all his manuscripts for gun-wads, but landed
with eleven thousand new verses.
“With such realization of ends and calculation of means, production
reduces itself largely to a matter of method. ‘The difference
between persons,’ said Emerson, ‘is not in wisdom, but in the art
of classifying and using facts.’ Each mind has some ways in which
it works most easily and efficiently; let us discover and arrange
for these, and reap the rewards. Then it is time to remember Dante’s
saying that ‘sitting upon down one cometh not to fame,’ and Whistler’s
that ‘drudgery leads to felicity,’ and Emerson’s that ‘inspiration
is the sister of daily labor.’ Newton made his discoveries ‘simply
by always thinking about them.’ Darwin’s method was as elaborate
as it was successful--with portfolios of abstracts, memoranda, and
references; detailed, general, and classified indexes for books;
brief, then full, then minute outlines before beginning to write.
Concentration and intensity of thought come almost of themselves
through such a system. Darwin’s practice, too, of writing rapidly and
later correcting deliberately, reaped the reward of both states of mind
without suffering the loss involved in continually changing from one
adjustment to another,--that drain of energy which makes interruptions
so wasteful, even to minds that focus quickly. Wisely controlled change
combines the benefits of continuity and variety. The scientist, whose
study requires muscular as well as mental activity, tires less easily
than the scholar busied wholly with books. Varying the adjustment
of the same part, or successively occupying different parts of the
mechanism, is more refreshing than total relaxation.
“While thus adapted to the mental mechanism, a successful system
must also be adjustable to the material in hand. Observation must
be receptive, reading selective. Poets may harvest their dreams;
historians must winnow their documents. Goethe’s ‘vast abundance
of objects that must be before us ere we can think upon them,’ and
Hawthorne’s ‘immense amount of history that it takes to make a little
literature,’ must be provided for, along with Pater’s selection and
rejection--‘all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.’
Every system ought to provide, at any time and in any place, some
form of record, careful enough to be permanent, yet so simple as not
to be wasteful if never used--an envelope that can contain data or
be written upon itself meets these needs. A system for preservation
and arrangement must be comprehensive enough to include everything,
accurate enough to make everything available, flexible enough to vary
with any need, yet so simple as not to become a tax. Few devices are
better than Darwin’s labelled portfolios, or smaller envelopes arranged
alphabetically or logically. Note-books are useful only when abstracted
or indexed. There are clergymen whose sermons write themselves as
particular texts accumulate references in the interleaved Bibles in
which they note what interests them. For coördination and organization
few things equal a tabular abstract on a single sheet of paper large
enough to show at a glance the nature of all the material. Such
implements influence intellectual efficiency more than we suppose. Much
crabbed writing is due to bad pens, much journalistic ease to soft
pencils. Self-realization and the sense of life depend upon some form
of diary; style varies with dictation and the typewriter.
“The chief criteria of mental efficiency, then,” read Professor
Maturin, with a glance at the clock, “lie between Matthew Arnold’s
definitions of genius--‘mainly an affair of energy’ and ‘an infinite
capacity for taking pains.’ Professor James, holding that the average
man uses only a small part of his energy, would have us persist through
fatigue and ‘second wind,’ perhaps to a third and a fourth. Even if
experiment, however, did not show that working beyond the fatigue
point yields a rapidly decreasing product at a rapidly increasing
cost, it would be uneconomic to attempt to increase our flow of
energy so long as we waste so much of what we have in inefficient and
unhygienic methods of work. Let us rather study the conditions of our
best moments, clear away hindrances, and provide helps. Let us prize
the spontaneous activity of each state, using fortunate moments for
concentration, less efficient periods for accumulation and selection,
looking to future coördination. Let us follow natural rhythms of
activity, relaxing primary activities by secondary functions useful
also in themselves. Thus regularity and routine will develop speed;
accumulation and economy end in ripeness. Quantity condenses into
quality; selection and arrangement grow into judgment and intuition
that may bear inspiration and vision. ‘A man’s vision,’ says Professor
James, ‘is the great thing about him.’ The natural history of such
vision, however, indicates that it is scarcely more than the synthetic
apex of long and careful accumulation. The moment of the aperçu is so
memorable that the conditions precedent are usually forgotten, but the
precious brilliance of the diamond is merely the result of a happy
crystallization of common elements.
“For all of which,” concluded Professor Maturin with a smile, as he
closed his portfolio, “I bespeak your most esteemed consideration.”
XI
_The Mystery of Dress_
Professor Maturin was leaning sidewise on his cane, gazing at the
river. I stood by his side several moments before he came out of his
reverie, greeted me warmly, and proposed a walk along the Drive.
“I was thinking,” said he, “of Fitzgerald’s falling overboard and
coming up serenely, still wearing his top hat. This morning, while
reading Scarron’s sonnet on the decay of the pyramids and his black
doublet, I noticed that I too needed a new coat. Later, I lunched
with one colleague who is as dressy as Disraeli, and another who goes
almost as much out at elbows as Napoleon when he entered Moscow. I have
just left a third, who is devoted to Lowell’s favorite combination
of short coat and top hat. That brought me, by way of Old Fitz, to a
general contemplation of the custom of wearing clothes. Hast any such
philosophy in thee, shepherd?”
“But little, I fear,” replied I, “unless Carlyle’s will do.”
“Scarcely, if you mean ‘Sartor Resartus,’” was his answer. “Do you
believe that man, by nature a naked animal, is demoralized by clothes,
and that a return to nudity would dissolve society? On the contrary,
when Humphrey Howarth, the surgeon, went to a duel naked for fear of
the infection of cloth in a gunshot wound, his antagonist came to his
senses and withdrew his challenge. Of course, I agree that whatever
represents spirit is a kind of clothing, and that wisdom looks through
vestures to realities. But clothes in ‘Sartor’ are merely the beginning
of a philosophy of things in general. Carlyle’s irritation when
Browning called on him in a green riding-coat, and his own refusal to
carry an umbrella are more to my point. It is obviously appropriate
that George Borrow should always have carried an umbrella, I understand
how Goethe could ignore waistcoats and Coleridge forget his shirt, but
why did Dickens dress like a dandy and Swinburne like a farmer? What do
clothes mean?”
“They sometimes represent the state of their owners’ finances,” said I.
“Lack of suitable clothing made Poe decline dinners and Johnson dine
behind the screen--if he really did.”
“And Lovelace vary between cloth of gold and rags,” continued Professor
Maturin meditatively, “much as Rembrandt varies his dress in his
portraits of himself. But that was when one man would wear the worth
of a thousand oaks and a hundred oxen, when mantles were conferred
by royal patent, and orders grew rich out of hat monopolies. To-day,
however, in spite of adulterations that I am told call for a pure
textile law, few of us are in need either of Pepys’ prayers to be able
to pay his tailor, or of Lord Westminster’s thrifty making over his
servants’ liveries for himself.
“Habit influences us more than cost, but what influences habit? Why
did Milton always wear black, Pope gray, and Lamb snuff color? Why did
distributing his cast clothes ‘disconsolate and intender’ Montaigne?
Why did Tennyson send his old clothes to be measured for new ones?
Why do I find myself repeating an outfit I once chose because it
suggested what naturalists call protective coloration--when an animal,
like a squirrel on a tree-trunk, is scarcely distinguishable from its
background? Do I make a good principle gloss a dull habit?”
“Such a habit,” I replied, “like George Fox’s suit of leather, does
deprive you of the interest that accompanies even unsuccessful effort
for variety. The fairer sex is never wearied in its quest of beautiful
garb, nor sated with the rapture of attainment.”
“How curiously we have changed all that,” replied Professor Maturin,
“in the three centuries since James Howell said that a letter should be
attired simply, like a woman; an oration richly, like a man. I would
not, like him, have putting on a clean shirt an occasion for special
prayer; but perhaps we have gone too far in our neglect of finery. Dr.
Holmes’s counsel, ‘always err upon the safe side,’ may be too cautious.
Allingham says that Leigh Hunt was old in street costume, but young in
his dressing-gown. Perhaps Goldsmith’s satin, or Jefferson’s plush, or
Mark Twain’s white flannels would renew my youth.”
“Are you elated by your scarlet gown on Commencement Day?” said I.
“By no means so much as the boys are,” he replied with a chuckle. “But
that suggests another aspect of the matter. Outward and visible signs
move those who are blind to inward graces. Since Protestantism is
retrieving some of its banished ceremonial, it might advance learning
to clothe it with more circumstance. Yet, we seem to hesitate at
symbolic clothing. Police and military uniforms help law and order, but
we tolerate ecclesiastical, judicial, and academic costume only during
the performance of specific functions. We are so far from intellectual
blue-stockings and political _sans-culottes_, that we smile at
musicians’ hair and painters’ cloaks, and banish yachting and golf
clothes from every-day wear.
“Simplicity seems the only unwritten law that has succeeded so many
written ones concerning clothes. Tradition itself is weak. We wear the
Roman orator’s neck-cloth, the wrist-bands that marked the gentleman’s
freedom from manual labor, the nobleman’s black evening clothes, the
courtier’s sword-belt and gauntlet buttons, and a sailor king’s long
trousers--but all because we wish to, or, at least, do not mind. Names
are naught, whether of mackintoshes or cravenettes or bluchers or
tam-o’-shanters. We ignore even fashion, with its ever varying promise
of equality to the uncomely and its powerful economic urge. We are
emancipated by a common sense in clothes that would have jailed a man
in Addison’s day.
“We may dress as we like, so long as we are inconspicuous, but we
must be that. We will no longer tolerate clothes-advertising like the
Admirable Crichton’s. The man who lost his lawsuit for damages because
his horse ran away when he saw the first top hat in England, would
recover at least costs to-day. Gautier deserved the mobbing his pink
doublet cost him. Tennyson was right to charge a young woman with
creaking stays, and to apologize when he found that the sound came from
his own braces.”
“What other principles would you adduce?” said I.
“A modicum of care,” he continued, “in agreement with Plato and Ruskin,
that ‘clothes carefully cared for and rightly worn, show a balanced
mind.’ I would have clothes appropriate, too, to climate, use, and the
individuality of the wearer. I was once advised, most profitably, by
a friendly portrait painter as to what was appropriate to my figure,
features, and coloring. He objected especially to my hats.
“It is curious how difficult hats are,” continued Professor Maturin,
after a pause that I forbore to break. “I doubt if any one, except
Fortunatus, ever had a perfect one. The Greeks were wise in having
little to do with them--suppose all Greek statues had their straw
bonnets tied under the chin! Indeed, hats are chiefly developments of
the last five centuries, and, it is said, baldness with them. Yet,
Synesius wrote ‘In Praise of Baldness;’ Caesar prized the privilege of
continually wearing a laurel crown because it hid his, and I do not
know why else the academic mortar-board comes down so far behind. I
will not wear a ventilating hat like Rossetti’s, although I long for
summer and the straws that America has done so much to popularize.
“I am too thin for the comfortable Tennysonian sombrero. I enjoy, as
a dressing-gown, a cowled Capuchin robe that I once had made on Lake
Orta, because of my theory that the flowering of the monastic mind
in the Middle Ages was due to the germinating heat of hoods. But,
generally, I would emulate an acquaintance who usually carries his
hat in his hand, or another who actually owns none, were that not too
conspicuous. Even Leigh Hunt’s charming essay on ‘Hats, Ancient and
Modern’ has no help for me--although I believe I might like a cocked
hat or a chapeau.
“I can take comfort in a coat,” he continued, “if it is loose; and in
overcoats, if they resemble Socrates’ cloak, or the cloak that Petrarch
bequeathed to Boccaccio. Indeed, I should welcome a return to shawls. I
am uncomfortable in any neckwear but black, or in any but reindeer gray
gloves. I should disesteem trousers had I not once inadvertently worn
a striped pair with evening clothes--since then I have respected their
power. In shoes I emulate Wellington’s care, for, like William Morris,
I need rather large ones. And I enjoy canes as much as Wellington did
umbrellas.”
“All of which,” said I, as we reached Professor Maturin’s door, “even
if unvaried, is sufficiently sober, appropriate, and individual.”
“And simple enough,” concluded he, “for Frederick the Great or
Newton. But, most of all, I wish that the Germans would extend their
investigations in the hygiene of clothing. If we knew more about that,
we might trust its architecture and ornamentation to any discriminating
tailor.”
XII
_Questions at Issue_
The Sindbad Society at its last meeting--on the night of the full moon,
according to custom--met within the hospitable doors of the Ollapod
Club. There, in the room with the roses on the ceiling, we had for
dinner caviare with limes, a thin mushroom soup, duck roasted over
spice-wood, Turinese pepperoni of chilies and preserved grapes, Leghorn
coffee, and Turkish sweetmeats.
The archaeologist was hot against such modern abuses as motor boats
in Venice, and motor cars on what he called the finest roads in the
world--those from Nice to Genoa, Amalfi to Sorrento, and Ragusa to
Gravosa. But when the diplomat begged him also to ban the ancient and
dishonorable dogs from Constantinople, he became resigned to life’s
little ironies, and, in response to a general request, described quite
wonderfully how, after years of fruitless digging, he had found a
royal tomb in Egypt, and entered its hot silence, to find its stately
presences, its furniture and linen, its sacrificial bread and incense
and flowers, all with their sense of yesterday enduring through the
ages.
This prompted the musician, who was reared in Turkey, to tell how an
Arab sheik he used to visit in the desert always bore with him the same
atmosphere of untold centuries. The colonel followed, queerly enough,
by saying that in his aeroplane tests he always had the same impression
of the endless duration of time. Then some one broke the happy spell,
as people will, with something clever and distracting, although the
joke was good enough--James Howell’s on people who “travel much but see
little, like Jonah in the whale.”
At that the talk scattered, the colonel describing Coromandel and
Malabar, the biologist a boat he was building, the mountain-climber
planning for Alaska, and the painter for Japan, until the psychologist
asked the last why he was going there.
The painter bent his head sidewise for a moment, as he does when he is
thoughtful, and then said: “Partly for the natural beauty, but chiefly
to study an art that does not disturb the truth of its impressions by
conscious theories like our perspective; that honors color and emotion
as well as line and thought.”
“Your psychology is sound,” commented the other. “Color vision is
very organic, which is to say, emotional; being apparently caused by
minute chemical changes in the eye, under the action of light. The
appreciation of line, on the other hand, seems to be due to mental
association with touching and feeling, and therefore is rather a matter
of attention and judgment.”
“Will you kindly explain me also?” asked the musician, who had been
telling how no one knows his own voice in a phonograph, because every
one hears his own speech reverberate through his inner, as well as his
outer ear.
“Music is the most emotional and the most rhythmical of the arts,”
continued the psychologist, “because the auditory nerve keeps close
company in the brain with nerves from the heart and lungs. Melody is
merely a series of answers to the body’s expectation of its usual
rhythm. As one of your own critics has said, when music seems to be
yearning for the unutterable it is only yearning for the next note.”
The musician quelled the psychologist with an imaginary baton, which he
then pointed at the biologist, saying, “Pray prove to the psychologist
that he is nothing but pulp.”
“He is surely little else,” smiled the biologist, “built by evolution
and run by a chemical engine.”
“Out on you scientists and your evolution!” broke in the archaeologist.
“Can your mechanism make a Raphael, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven? Can
your evolution show any architecture, sculpture, statecraft, drama,
or philosophy equal to those of the age of Pericles? The world will
produce nothing fine or permanent so long as you fellows tinker
with its machinery. Your heresy of universal progress is merely a
contemporary mythology that is falser than--”
“Softly, softly,” said Professor Maturin, shaking his long forefinger
at the disputants. “The true philosopher, with Dante, loves every part
of wisdom. Why can we not all enjoy knowing that cats hear better than
dogs, and, at the same time, appreciate Blake’s saying that the sun is
not a round ball of fire, but the glory of the universe?”
Everybody prepared to be mollified until Professor Maturin undid his
peacemaking by asking the astronomer to tell us all what a comet
looked like. When the astronomer replied that he had not looked
through a telescope for years, but spent his time entirely in making
calculations, the archaeologist threw up his hands and moved over to
the painter and the musician, growling that he was going to spend the
rest of the evening talking to somebody he understood.
I heard the two eagerly agree with him that the Nile was the finest
river in the world, if you were there in November, but that you ought
never go to Japan except in summer, and then I moved to other groups,
where the mountaineer was comparing the view of the eternal snows from
Darjeeling with that of valley, river, and sea from Mount Wellington,
in Tasmania; or the diplomat was telling about Bulgaria; or the
importer describing the Taj Mahal by moonlight; or the psychologist
quoting, with a twinkle toward the archaeologist, Sir Francis Galton’s
saying, that men who are too bad for Europe go to Constantinople, those
who are too bad for Constantinople go to Cairo, and those who are too
bad for Cairo go to Khartoum.
Everybody talked for a long while, since this was the last meeting for
the year, and in spite of the earlier disagreement, which was, perhaps,
more apparent than real, I remember the evening as one of especial
illumination.
XIII
_The Fountain of Youth_
Professor Maturin’s study lamps were dimmed to the mellow glow that
makes good talk. But his coffee and cigars were so worthy of the dinner
we had just ended that we continued to smoke in silent content, until
our host asked about the Vicar’s vacation.
“My plans are about as usual,” answered that worthy, naming his
sea-shore place without enthusiasm.
“Mine, too, are about the same,” added Professor Maturin, naming his
similar place, with a similar lack of interest.
The Physician hemmed severely and shifted in his chair. “Let us have
it,” smiled Professor Maturin.
“Why will you act as though you were a hundred years old?” said he.