It is not only every country that has its own language. It is each
generation. The books and family letters of our grandfathers are not
quite in our dialect. And so of the books of their grandfathers, and the
letters they wrote. These dialects are not so different from ours that
we can't make them out: they sound a little queer, that is all. Just as
our own way of talking and writing (and thinking) will seem so quaint to
our descendants that they'll put us away on the shelves.
A few books are written in a tongue that all times understand.
A few of us are linguists and have learned to enjoy the books of all
ages.
For the rest, aged books need translation into the speech of the day.
The poets of each generation seldom sing a new song. They turn to themes
men always have loved, and sing them in the mode of their times. Each
new tribe of artists perpetually repaints the same pictures. The
story-men tell the same stories. They remain fresh and young.
The disguise is new sometimes, but never the story behind it. A few
generations ago, when some one wrote Humpty-Dumpty, he was merely
retelling an old story for the men of his era, one of the oldest of
stories, the first part of Genesis.
It is a condensed account--it leaves out the serpent and Eve and the
apple. Some editor blue-penciled these parts, perhaps, as fanciful
little digressions. "Stick to the main theme," said the editor, "don't
go wandering off into frills. Your story is about the fall of Adam. Get
on. Make him fall."
"I had intended to introduce a love-interest," the author of
Humpty-Dumpty explained.
"A love interest!" sneered the editor. "You should have waited to be
born in the twentieth century. These are manlier times. Give us men and
adventure and fate."
"And what about the garden," the author sighed. "Must that be cut too?"
"By all means. Change the garden. It's a pretty enough idea in romance.
But a realist who has worked in one, knows that a garden's no paradise.
Genesis got it just wrong. Adam should have been exiled from town as a
punishment, and put to slave in a garden."
"But town isn't paradise either. We've got to start him in paradise."
"Dear me," said the editor. "There's only one place left to put the
fellow, and that's on the wall. 'Adam sat on a wall.' Begin that way."
[Illustration: Cinderella]
"I'm calling him Humpty-Dumpty," the author said. "It makes it less
tragic. It suggests that the fall didn't hurt Man so much after all."
"Which is true," said the editor.
I wish I had known that author. He had a kind heart. He has changed even
the unforgiving cherubim in the Genesis story to those King's men who
try in such a friendly way to restore Humpty-Dumpty. But the story can't
let them. That would leave the hero back on his wall again--like some
Greek philosopher. This other way, we think of him as starting out to
conquer the world.
Humpty-Dumpty is a story for boys. Cinderella for girls. In Cinderella
five able females, two old and three young, contend most resourcefully
to capture one stupid young man. It is a terrible story. The beautiful
surface barely masks the hungry wiles underneath. But it's true. It
depicts the exact situation a marrying girl has to face; and, even while
she's a tot in the nursery, it reminds her to plan.
But these are examples of stories that live, and last for more than one
age. The mortality is heavier in other fields. For instance, philosophy.
Great philosophical works of past eras are still alive in a sense, but
they dwell among us as foreigners do, while Mother Goose has been
naturalized.
Modern philosophies are so different. Not many centuries ago, in those
eras when few changes took place, men thought of the world as something
to study, instead of to mold. It was something to appropriate and
possess, to be sure, but not to transform.
Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall, then. He hadn't begun his new life.
There were few inventors in those old times, and few of those few were
honored. Edison among the Greeks would have been as lonely as Plato with
us.
Civilization was Thought. It was measured by what men knew and felt of
eternal things. It was wisdom.
Civilization to-day is invention: it is measured by our control over
nature. If you remind a modern that nature is not wholly ductile, he is
profoundly discouraged! "We _expect_ to make over and control our
world." We not only assume it is possible, we assume it is best.
What is democracy but a form of this impulse, says Professor George
Plimpton Adams, "bidding man not to content himself with any political
order thrust upon him, but actively to construct that order so that it
does respond to his own nature"?
"Not contemplation ... but creative activity," that is our modern
attitude.
Well, it's all very interesting.
Will and Wisdom are both mighty leaders. Our times worship Will.
[Illustration: Will and Wisdom]