nobody but that all-around musical amateur, the Auto-Comrade, can so
exquisitely whistle, hum, strum, fiddle, blat, or roar. There is also
a universe full of new ones for him to improvise. And he is the
jolliest sort of fellow musician, because, when you play or sing a
duet with him, you can combine with the exciting give-and-take and
reciprocal stimulation of the duet, the god-like autocracy of the
solo, its opportunity for wide, uninterrupted, uncoerced
self-expression. Sometimes, however, in the first flush of escape with
him to the wilds, you are fain to clap your hand over his mouth in
order the better to taste the essentially folk-less savor of solitude.
For music is a curiously social art, and Browning was more than half
right when he said, "Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at
once."
Perhaps you can find your entertainer a small lump of clay or
modeling-wax to thumb into bad caricatures of those you love and good
ones of those you hate, until increasing facility impels him to try
and model not a Tanagra figurine, for that would be unlike his
original fancy, but a Hoboken figurine, say, or a sketch for some
Elgin (Illinois) marbles.
If you care anything for poetry and can find him a stub of pencil and
an unoccupied cuff, he will be most completely in his element; for if
there is any one occupation more closely identified with him than
another, it is that of poet. And though all Auto-Comrades are not
poets, all poets are Auto-Comrades. Every poem which has ever thrilled
this world or another has been written by the Auto-Comrade of some
so-called poet. This is one reason why the so-called poets think so
much of their great companions. "Allons! after the great companions!"
cried old Walt to his fellow poets. If he had not overtaken, and held
fast to, his, we should never have heard the "Leaves of Grass"
whispering "one or two indicative words for the future." The bards
have always obeyed this call. And they have known how to value their
Auto-Comrades, too. See, for example, what Keats thought of his:
Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at
the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the Carpet were of
Silk, the Curtains of the morning Clouds; the chairs and
Sofa stuffed with Cygnet's down; the food Manna, the Wine
beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander mere, I should
not feel--or rather my Happiness would not be so fine, as my
Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described,
there is a sublimity to welcome me home--The roaring of the
wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my
Children.... I feel more and more every day, as my
imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world
alone but in a thousand worlds--No sooner am I alone than
shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve
my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's
body-guard.... I live more out of England than in it. The
Mountains of Tartary are a favorite lounge, if I happen to
miss the Alleghany ridge, or have no whim for Savoy.
This last sentence not only reveals the fact that the Auto-Comrade,
equipped as he is with a wishing-mat, is the very best cicerone in the
world, but also that he is the ideal tramping companion. Suppose you
are mountain-climbing. As you start up into "nature's observatory," he
kneels in the dust and fastens wings upon your feet. He conveniently
adjusts a microscope to your hat-brim, and hangs about your neck an
excellent telescope. He has enough sense, too, to keep his mouth
closed. For, like Hazlitt, he "can see no wit in walking and talking."
The joy of existence, you find, rarely tastes more cool and sweet and
sparkling than when you and your Auto-Comrade make a picnic thus,
swinging in a basket between you a real, live thought for lunch. On
such a day you come to believe that Keats, on another occasion, must
have had his own Auto-Comrade in mind when he remarked to his friend
Solitude that
"... it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee."
The Auto-Comrade can sit down with you in thick weather on a barren
lighthouse rock and give you a breathless day by hanging upon the
walls of fog the mellow screeds of old philosophies, and causing to
march and countermarch over against them the scarlet and purple
pageants of history. Hour by hour, too, he will linger with you in
the metropolis, that breeder of the densest solitudes--in market or
terminal, subway, court-room, library, or lobby--and hour by hour
unlock you those chained books of the soul to which the human
countenance offers the master key.
Something of a sportsman, too, is the Auto-Comrade. He it is who makes
the fabulously low score at golf--the kind of score, by the way, that is
almost invariably born to blush unseen. And he will uncomplainingly,
even zestfully, fish from dawn to dusk in a solitude so complete that
there is not even a fin to break it. But if there are fish, he finds
them. He knows how to make the flies float indefinitely forward through
yonder narrow opening, and drop, as light as thistledown, in the center
of the temptingly inaccessible pool. He knows without looking, exactly
how thick and how prehensile are the bushes and branches that lie in
wait for the back cast, and he can calculate to a grain how much urging
the reactionary three-pounder and the blest tie that binds him to the
four-ounce rod will stand.
He is one of the handiest possible persons to have along in the woods.
When you take him on a canoe trip with others, and the party comes to
"white water," he turns out to be a dead shot at rapid-shooting. He is
sure to know what to do at the supreme moment when you jam your
setting-pole immutably between two rocks and, with the alternative of
taking a bath, are forced to let go and grab your paddle; and are then
hung up on a slightly submerged rock at the head of the chief rapid
just in time to see the rest of the party disappear majestically
around the lower bend. At such a time, simply look to the
Auto-Comrade. He will carry you through. Also there is no one like him
at the moment when, having felled your moose, leaned your rifle
against a tree, and bent down the better to examine him, the creature
suddenly comes to life.
In tennis, when you wake up to find that your racket has just smashed
a lob on the bounce from near the back-net, scoring a clean ace
between your paralyzed opponents, you ought to know that the racket
was guided by that superior sportsman; and if you are truly modest,
you will admit that your miraculous stop wherewith the team whisked
the baseball championship out of the fire in the fourteenth inning was
due to his unaided efforts.
There are other games about which he is not so keen: solitaire, for
instance. For solitaire is a social game that soon loses its zest if
there be not some devoted friend or relative sitting by and simulating
that pleasureable absorption in the performance which you yourself
only wish that you could feel.
This great companion can keep you from being lonely even in a crowd.
But there is a certain kind of crowd that he cannot abide. Beware how
you try to keep him in a crowd of unadulterated human porcupines! You
know how the philosopher Schopenhauer once likened average humanity
to a herd of porcupines on a cold day, who crowd stupidly together for
warmth, prick one another with their quills, are mutually repelled,
forget the incident, grow cold again, and repeat the whole thing _ad
infinitum_.
In other words, the human porcupine is the person considered at the
beginning of this one-sided discussion who, to escape the terrible
catastrophe of confronting his own inner vacuum, will make friends
with the most hideous bore. This creature, however, is much more rare
than the misanthropic Schopenhauer imagined. It takes a long time to
find one among such folk as lumbermen, gypsies, shirt-waist
operatives, fishermen, masons, trappers, sailors, tramps, and
teamsters. If the sour philosopher had only had the pleasure of
knowing those teamsters who sent him into paroxysms of rage by
cracking their whips in the alley, I am sure that he would never have
spoken as harshly of their minds as he did. The fact is that
porcupines are not extremely common among the very "common" people.
It may be that there is something stupefying about the airs which the
upper classes, the best people, breathe and put on, but the social
climber is apt to find the human porcupine in increasing herds as he
scales the heights. This curious fact would seem incidentally to show
that our misanthropic philosopher must have moved exclusively in the
best circles.
Now, if there is one thing above all others that the Auto-Comrade
cannot away with, it is the flaccid, indolent, stodgy brain of the
porcupine. If people have let their minds slump down into
porcupinishness, or have never taken the trouble to rescue them from
that ignominious condition--well, the Auto-Comrade is no snob; when
all's said, he is a rather democratic sort of chap. But he has to draw
the line somewhere, you know, and he really must beg to be excused
from rubbing shoulders with such intellectual rabble, for instance, as
blocks upper Fifth Avenue on Sunday noons. He prefers instead the
rabble which, on all other noons of the week, blocks the lower end of
that variegated thoroughfare.
Such exclusiveness lays the Auto-Comrade open, of course, to the
charge of inhospitality. But "is not he hospitable," asks Thoreau,
"who entertains good thoughts?" Personally, I think he is. And I
believe that this sort of hospitality does more to make the world
worth living in than much conventional hugging to your bosom of
porcupines whose language you do not speak, yet with whom it is
embarrassing to keep silence.
If the Auto-Comrade mislikes the porcupine, however, the feeling is
returned with exorbitant interest. The alleged failings of
auto-comradeship have always drawn grins, jokes, fleers, and nudges,
from the auto-comradeless. It is time the latter should know that the
joke is really on him; for he is the most forlorn of mankind. The
other is never at a loss. He is invulnerable, being one whom "destiny
may not surprise nor death dismay." But the porcupine is liable at any
moment to be deserted by associates who are bored by his sharp, hollow
quills. He finds himself the victim of a paradox which decrees that
the hermit shall "find his crowds in solitude" and never be alone; but
that the flocker shall every now and then be cast into inner darkness,
where shall be "weeping and gnashing of teeth."
The laugh is on the porcupine; but the laugh turns almost into a tear
when one stops to realize the nature of his plight. Why, the poor
wretch is actually obliged to be near someone else in order to enjoy a
sense of vitality! In other words, he needs somebody else to do his
living for him. He is a vicarious citizen of the world, holding his
franchise only by courtesy of Tom, Dick, and Harry. All the same, it
is rather hard to pity him very profoundly while he continues to feel
quite as contemptuously superior as he usually does. For, the contempt
of the average porcupine for pals of the Auto-Comrade is akin to the
contempt which the knights of chivalry felt for those paltry beings
who were called clerks because they possessed the queer, unfashionable
accomplishment of being able to read and write.
I remember that the loudest laugh achieved by a certain class-day
orator at college came when he related how the literary guy and the
tennis-player were walking one day in the woods, and the literary guy
suddenly exclaimed: "Ah, leave me, Louis! I would be alone." Even
apart from the stilted language in which the orator clothed the
thought of the literary guy, there is, to the porcupine, something
irresistibly comic in such a situation. It is to him as though the
literary guy had stepped up to the nearest policeman and begged for
the room at Sing Sing already referred to.
Indeed, the modern porcupine is as suspicious of pals of the
Auto-Comrade as the porcupines of the past were of sorcerers and
witches--folk, by the way, who probably consorted with spirits no more
malign than Auto-Comrades. "What," asked the porcupines of one
another, "can they be doing, all alone there in those solitary huts?
What honest man would live like that? Ah, they must be up to no good.
They must be hand in glove with the Evil One. Well, then, away with
them to the stake and the river!"
As a matter of fact, it probably was not the Evil One that these poor
folk were consorting with, but the Good One. For what is a man's
Auto-Comrade, anyway, but his own soul, or the same thing by what
other name soever he likes to call it, with which he divides the
practical, conscious part of his brain, turn and turn about, share and
share alike? And what is a man's own soul but a small stream of the
infinite, eternal water of life? And what is heaven but a vast harbor
where myriad streams of soul flow down, returning at last to their
Source in the bliss of perfect reunion? I believe that many a Salem
witch was dragged to her death from sanctuary; for church is not
exclusively connected with stained glass and collection-baskets.
Church is also wherever you and your Auto-Comrade can elude the
starched throng and fall together, if only for a moment, on your
knees.
The Auto-Comrade has much to gain by contrast with one's
flesh-and-blood associates, especially if this contrast is suddenly
brought home to one after a too long separation from him. I shall
never forget the thrill that was mine early one morning after two
months of close, uninterrupted communion with one of my best and
dearest friends. At the very instant when the turn of the road cut off
that friend's departing hand-wave, I was aware of a welcoming, almost
boisterous shout from the hills of dream, and turning quickly, beheld
my long-lost Auto-Comrade rushing eagerly down the slopes toward me.
Few joys may compare with the joy of such a sudden unexpected reunion.
It is like "the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land." No,
this simile is too disloyal to my friend. Well, then, it is like a
beaker full of the warm South when you are leaving a good beer country
and are trying to reconcile yourself to ditch-water for the next few
weeks. At any rate, similes or not, there were we two together again
at last. What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the
veranda of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities
of the Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly
birch and blood-red maple banners to the far violet mountains of the
Aroostook! And how we did take stock of the immediate past, chuckling
to find that it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly
supposed. What gilded forest trails were those which we blazed into
the glamorous land of to-morrow! And every other moment these
recreative labors would be interrupted while I pressed between the
pages of a notebook some butterfly or sunset leaf or quadruply
fortunate clover which my Auto-Comrade found and turned over to me.
(Between two of those pages, by the way, I afterwards found the
argument of this chapter.)
Then, when the effervescence of our meeting had lost a little of its
first, fine, carbonated sting, what Elysian hours we did spend over
the correspondence of those other two friends, Goethe and Schiller!
Passage after passage we would turn back to re-read and muse over.
These we would discuss without any of the rancor or dogmatic
insistence or one-eyed stubbornness that usually accompany the clash
of mental steel on mental steel from a different mill. And without
making any one else lose the thread or grow short-breathed or accuse
us passionately of reading ahead, we would, on the slightest
provocation, out-Fletcher Fletcher chewing the cud of sweet and bitter
fancy. And we would underline and bracket and side-line and overline
the ragged little paper volume, and scribble up and down its margins,
and dream over its footnotes, to our hearts' content.
Such experiences, though, are all too rare with me. Why? Because my
Auto-Comrade is a rather particular person and will not associate with
me unless I toe his mark.
"Come," I propose to him, "let us go a journey."
"Hold hard," says he, and looks me over appraisingly. "You know the
rule of the Auto-Comrades' Union. We are supposed to associate with
none but fairly able persons. Are you a fairly able person?"
If it turns out that I am not, he goes on a rampage, and begins to
talk like an athletic trainer. The first thing he demands is that his
would-be associate shall keep on hand a jolly good store of surplus
vitality. You are expected to supply exuberance to him somewhat as you
supply gasolene to your motor. Now, of course, there are in the world
not a few invalids and other persons of low physical vitality whose
Auto-Comrades happen to have sufficient gasolene to keep them both
running, if only on short rations. Most of these cases, however, are
pathological. They have hot-boxes at both ends of the machine, and
their progress is destined all too soon to cease and determine
disastrously. The rest of these cases are the rare exceptions which
prove the rule. For unexuberant yet unpathological pals of the
Auto-Comrade are as rare as harmonious households in which the efforts
of a devoted and blissful wife support an able-bodied husband.
The rule is that you have got to earn exuberance for two. "Learn to
eat balanced rations right," thunders the Auto-Comrade, laying down
the law; "exercise, perspire, breathe, bathe, sleep out of doors, and
sleep enough; rule your liver with a rod of iron, don't take drugs or
nervines, cure sickness beforehand, keep love in your heart, do an
adult's work in the world, have at least as much fun as you ought to
have."
"That," he goes on, "is the way to develop enough physical overplus so
that you will be enabled to overcome your present sad addiction to
mob-intoxication. And, provided your mind is not in as bad condition
as your body, this physical overplus will transmute some of itself
into mental exuberance. This will enable you to have more fun with
your mind than an enthusiastic kitten has with its tail. It will
enable you to look before and after, and purr over what is, as well as
to discern, with pleasurable longing, what is not, and set forth
confidently to capture it."
But if, by any chance, you have allowed your mind to get into the sort
of condition which the old-fashioned German scholar used to allow his
body to get into, it develops that the Auto-Comrade hates a flabby
brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clear
that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered
the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he demands
of his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. This is one
reason why so many more Auto-Comrades are to be found in
crow's-nests, gypsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on upper
Fifth Avenue. For, watching the stars and the sea from a swaying
masthead, taking light-heartedly to the open road, or even operating a
rather unwholesome sewing-machine all day in silence, is better for
consecutiveness of mind than a never-ending round of offices, clubs,
committees, servants, dinners, teas, and receptions, to each of which
one is a little late.
In diffusing knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, this knack of
concentration, Arnold Bennett's little books on mental efficiency have
done wonders for the art of auto-comradeship. Their popular
persuasiveness has coaxed thousands on thousands of us to go in for a
few minutes' worth of mental calisthenics every day. They have
actually cajoled us into the painful feat of glancing over a page of a
book and then putting it down and trying to retrace the argument in
memory. Or they have coaxed us to fix on some subject--any
subject--for reflection, and then scourge our straying minds back to
it at every few steps of the walk to the morning train. And we have
found that the mental muscles have responded at once to this
treatment. They have hardened under the exercise until being left
alone has begun to change from confinement in the same cell with that
worst of enemies who has the right to forge one's own name--into a
joyful pleasure jaunt with a totally different person who, if not
one's best friend, is at least to be counted on as a trusty,
entertaining, resourceful, unselfish associate--at times, perhaps, a
little exacting--yet certainly a far more brilliant and generally
satisfactory person than his companion.
No matter what the ignorant or the envious may say, there is nothing
really unsocial in a moderate indulgence in the art of auto-comradeship.
A few weeks of it bring you back with a fresher, keener appreciation of
your other friends and of humanity in general than you had before
setting forth. In the continuous performance of the psalm of life such
contrasts as this of solos and choruses have a reciprocal advantage.
But auto-comradeship must not be overdone, as it was overdone by the
mediæval monks. Its delights are too delicious, its particular vintage
of the wine of experience too rich, for long-continued consumption.
Consecutive thought, though it is one of man's greatest pleasures, is
at the same time perhaps the most arduous labor that he can perform.
And after a long period of it, both the Auto-Comrade and his companion
become exhausted and, perforce, less comradely.
Besides the incidental exhaustion, there is another reason why this
beatific association must have its time-limit; for, unfortunately,
one's Auto-Comrade is always of the same sex as one's self, and in
youth, at least, if the presence of the complementary part of creation
is long denied, there comes a time when this denial surges higher and
higher in subconsciousness, then breaks into consciousness, and keeps
on surging until it deluges all the tranquillities, zests, surprises,
and excitements of auto-comradeship, and makes them of no effect.
This is, probably, a wise provision for the salvation of the human
digestion. For otherwise, many a man, having tasted of the fruit of
the tree of the knowledge of auto-comradeship, might thereupon be
tempted to retire to his hermit's den hard by and endeavor to sustain
himself for life on this food alone.
Most of us, however, long before such extremes have been reached, are
sure to rush back to our kind for the simple reason that we are
enjoying auto-comradeship so much that we want someone else to enjoy
it with.
VI
VIM AND VISION
Efficiency is to-day the Hallelujah Chorus of industry. I know a
manufacturer who recently read a book on business management.
Stop-watch in hand he then made an exhaustive study of his office
force and their every action. After considering the tabulated results
he arose, smashed all but one of the many office mirrors, bought
modern typewriters, and otherwise eliminated works of supererogation.
The sequel is that a dozen stenographers to-day perform the work of
the former thirty-two.
This sort of thing is spreading through the business world and beyond
it in every direction. Even the artists are studying the bearing of
industrial efficiency on the arts of sculpture, music, literature,
architecture, and painting. But beyond the card catalogue and the
filing cabinet the artists find that this new gospel has little to
offer them. Their sympathies go out, instead, to a different kind of
efficiency. The kind that bids fair to shatter their old lives to bits
and re-mold them nearer to the heart's desire is not industrial but
human. For inspiration it goes back of the age of Brandeis to the age
of Pericles.
The enthusiasm for human efficiency is beginning to rival that for
industrial efficiency. Preventive medicine, public playgrounds, the
new health education, school hygiene, city planning, eugenics, housing
reform, the child-welfare and country-life movements, the cult of
exercise and sport--these all are helping to lower the death-rate and
enrich the life-rate the world over. Health has fought with smoke and
germs and is now in the air. It would be strange if the receptive
nature of the artist should escape the benignant infection.