skeletons with which we live. Some run to the closet door, and try to
lock it fast when a neighbor comes their way. If perchance any fear of
discovery is felt, they stand guard outside and solemnly protest that
there is nothing in the room. Their anxiety and haste plainly show fear
lest their hated guest shall reveal its face; and of course there rises
in the neighbor’s mind a vision of a skeleton more horrible by far than
the one inside the door or than anyone can be. If the luckless jailer
really fears that the rattle of the prisoner’s bones has been heard
outside, he feels it his duty to carefully explain or tediously cover up
every detail and circumstance that caused the presence of the specter in
the house. All this can only show that the guest is terrible to behold
or that the jailer is so poor and weak that he himself is a helpless
prisoner to his foolish pride and unmanly fear. It can only serve to
emphasize the presence he tries so vainly to deny. There are also those
who know that their skeleton has been seen, or who having lost all else
but this persistent, grinning guest, drag it out and parade it in the
world to gain the sympathy or the money of their neighbors and their
friends, like the crippled beggar standing on the corner holding out his
hat to every passer-by. The true man neither guiltily conceals nor
anxiously explains nor vulgarly parades. He lives his life the best he
can, and lets it stand for what it is. A thousand idle tales may be true
or false. One may have seen but certain things, and placed him with the
saints. Another little soul, who never felt the breadth and depth of
human life, may have seen his scars alone, and cast him out. But
standing by his side, or clasping his strong, sympathetic hand, no one
thinks of halos or scars or asks an explanation of this or that, for in
his whole being is felt the divine presence of a great soul, who has
lived and loved, sinned and suffered, and been strengthened and purified
by all.
The skeleton is really kind that it only grins as we look it in the
face. Of all our household it has received the hardest treatment at our
hands. It has helped us more than any of the rest, and been locked in
the closet for its pains. It may perchance have come at our own
invitation, bringing us the keenest, wildest joy our life had ever
known. We gladly drained the pleasure to the dregs, and then coolly
locked the memory close in the darkest hole that we could find. The day
it came, has well nigh faded from our minds, and the mad, wild joy we
knew can never more be wakened from the burned-out passions of the past,
but the skeleton, which rose up grim and ghastly from the dying flame,
remains to mock and jeer and make us sad. And now when the day is spent
and the cup is drained, we charge the poor specter with our lasting
pain, and forget the joy it brought. We look with dread at these
mocking, grinning bones, which we cannot drive away, and we forget the
time, long, long ago, when those dry sticks were covered up with
beautiful and tempting flesh.
It may be that we shall always shudder as we hear the rattle of the
bones when we pass the closet door, but in justice to the inmate, we
should give him credit for the joys of long ago. And this brings us back
to the old question of the balancing of pain and pleasure, good and
evil, right and wrong. It may be that in the mysterious adjustment of
nature’s balances, a moment of supreme bliss will outweigh an eternity
of pain. In the infinite economy, which life counted for the more,—that
of Napoleon, or the poor French peasant that passed through an obscure
existence to an unknown grave? The brief glory of Austerlitz was
followed by the bitterness of Waterloo, and the long silence of an
exile’s life, while the peasant trod his short path without ambition,
and filled a nameless grave without regret. Which is the greater and
finer, the blameless life of the patient brute, or the winding, devious
path of a human soul? It is only the dull level that brings no sorrow or
regret. It is a sterile soil where no weeds will grow, and a bare closet
where no skeleton will dwell.
Neither should we remember the skeleton only for the joy it brought;
from the day it came, it has been the greatest benefactor that our life
has known. When the mad delirium had passed away, and the last lingering
fragrance was almost spent, this despised skeleton remained as the sole
companion, whose presence should forever bind us back to those feelings
that were fresh and true and straight from nature’s heart, and that
world which once was green and young and filled with pulsing life. As
the shadows gather round our head, and our once-straying feet fall
mechanically into the narrow path so straight and even at the farther
end, we may shudder now and then at the thought of the grim skeleton
whose life is so far removed from our sober later selves; but with the
shudder comes a spark, a flash of that great, natural light and heat
that once possessed this tottering frame, and gave a glow of feeling and
a strength of purpose so deep and all-controlling that the artificial
life of an artificial world seems no more than a dim candle shining by
the glorious sun.
It is the exhausted emotions of age, which men call prudence, that are
ever warning youth of the follies of its sins. It is the grinning
skeleton, speaking truly from the memory of other days, that insists
that life’s morning held the halcyon hours. Does old age outlive the
follies of childhood or does the man outgrow the wisdom of youth? The
most vociferous preachers are often those whose natural spirits have led
them to drink the deepest of life. They are so foolish as to think that
others can be taught by their experiences, and mumbling grey-beards
endorse the excellence and wisdom of the sermons that they preach. They
are not wise enough to know that their prattle is more vain and foolish
than the babblings of their childhood days. It was the growing, vital
sap of life that made them children years ago; it is the icy, palsying
touch of age that makes them babbling, preaching children once again. As
well might the calm and placid lake teach the beauty of repose to the
boiling, seething cataract, that thunders down Niagara’s gulf. When the
troubled waters shall have reached the lake they shall be placid too.
Nature is wiser far than man. She makes the first childhood precede the
second. If the age of prudence came with youth, it would be a dull and
prosy world for a little time; then life would be extinct upon the earth
and death triumphant over all.
But these are the smallest reasons why we should venerate the neglected
skeleton, which we have ruthlessly cast into the closet as if it were a
hideous thing. This uncanny skeleton, ever thrusting its unwelcome bones
into our presence and our lives, has been the most patient, persistent,
constant teacher that all our years have known. We look backward through
the long dim vista of the past, back to the little trusting child that
once nestled on its mother’s breast and from whose loving lips and
gentle soul it first was told of life, its temptations and its sins;
backward to her, whose whole thought was a benediction to the life that
was once a portion of herself. We remember still this mother’s words
teaching us the way to live and telling us the way to die. We always
knew that no selfish thought inspired a single word she said and yet
time and time again we strayed and wandered from the path she pointed
out. We could not keep the road and after while we did not try. Again
our teacher told us of the path. He, too, was good and kind and knew the
way we ought to go, and showed us all the bad results of sin, and still
we stumbled on. The preacher came and told us of the beauteous heaven,
straight at the other end of the narrow path, and the yawning gulf of
hell to which our shifting footsteps led; but we heeded not his solemn
tones, though they seemed to come with the authority of God himself. As
the years went on, our mother’s voice was stilled, the teacher’s words
were hushed, the preacher’s threats became an empty, hollow sound; and
in their place came the grinning skeleton, born of our own desires and
deeds; less loving than the gentle mother, more real and life-like than
the teacher, saner and truer than the preacher’s idle words. It was ever
present and persistent; it was a portion of our very selves.
We detested and feared the hated thing; we locked it in the closet, and
denied that it was there; but through the brightness of the day and the
long and silent watches of the night, we heard its rattling bones, and
felt its presence at our side. No teacher of our youth was like that
grim and ghastly skeleton, which we tried to hide away. The schoolmaster
of our early life took our fresh, young, plastic minds and sought to
crowd them full of useless, unrelated facts that served no purpose
through the years that were to come. These lessons that our teacher made
us learn by rote filled so small a portion of our daily lives that most
of them were forgotten when the school-house door was closed. When now
and then we found some use for a trifling thing that we had learned
through years at school, we were surprised to know that the pedagogue
had taught us even this. In those early days it seemed to us that life
would consist of one long examination in which we should be asked the
names of states, the rule of three, and the words the Romans used for
this and that. All that we were taught of the great world outside and
the problem that would one day try our souls, was learned from the copy
books where we wrote the same old maxim until all the paper was used up.
In after years, we learned that, while the copy book might have taught
us how to write in a stilted, unused hand, still all its maxims were
untrue.
We left the school as ignorant of life as we commenced, nay, we might
more easily have learned its lesson without the false, misleading
theories we were taught were true. When the doors were opened and the
wide world met us face to face, we tested what we learned, and found it
false, and then we blundered on alone. We were taught by life that the
fire and vigor of our younger years could not be governed by the
platitudes of age. Nature was ever present with her strong and earthly
grasp, her keen desires, her white hot flame. We learned the precepts of
the books, but we lived the life that nature taught.
Our pathetic blunders and mistakes, and the skeleton that followed in
their wake, remained to teach us what was false and point to what was
true. This grim, persistent teacher made but little of the unimportant
facts that the schoolmaster sought to make us learn, and it laughed to
scorn the preacher’s doctrine, that in some way we could avoid the
results of our mistakes and sins. It did not preach, it took its place
beside us as another self and by its presence sought to make us know
that we could not be at peace until we clasped it to our breast and
freely accepted the unwelcome thing as a portion of our lives.
Only the smallest fraction that we learned in youth was assimilated and
made a portion of ourselves; the rest faded so completely that it seemed
never to have been. The teacher soon became a dim, uncertain memory of
the past, whose voice had long since died away; but the skeleton in the
closet never wearied nor grew old. It ever made us learn again the
lesson we would fain forget; opened at each succeeding period of our
lives the pages we would gladly put away, until, at last, the ripening
touch of time and the specter’s constant presence made us know. From the
day it came beneath our roof, it remained the liveliest, wisest, most
persistent member of the family group, the tireless, watchful teacher,
who would neither sleep nor allow its pupil to forget.
It may be that there are lives so barren and uneventful that this guest
passes ever by their door, but unfortunate indeed is that abode where it
will not dwell. The wide vistas can be seen only from the mountain top,
and the infinite depths of life can be sounded only by the soul that has
been softened and hallowed by the sanctifying touch of misery and sin.
Life is a never-ending school, and the really important lessons all tend
to teach man his proper relation to the environment where he must live.
With wild ambitions and desires untamed, we are spawned out into a
shoreless sea of moving molecules of life, each separate atom journeying
on an unknown course, regardless of the countless other lives it meets
as it blindly rushes on; no lights nor headlands stand to point the
proper way the voyager should take, he is left to sail an untried bark
across an angry sea. If no disaster should befall, it does not show that
the traveler is wise or good, but that his ambitions and desires are few
or he has kept close inside the harbor line. At first we seek to swim
the flood, to scale the rocky heights, to clutch the twinkling stars. Of
course we fail and fall, and the scars our passions and ambitions leave,
remain, though all our particles are made anew year after year. We learn
at last to leave the stars to shine where they belong, to take all
things as they are and adjust our lives to what must be.
The philosophy of life can come only from those experiences that leave
lasting scars and results that will not die. Rather than seek to cover
up these gaping wounds, we should accept with grace the tales they tell,
and show them as trophies of the strife we have passed through. Those
scars are honorable that have brought our lives into greater harmony
with the universal power. For resist it as we will, this infinite,
loving presence will ever claim us as a portion of its self until our
smallest fragments return once more to earth, and are united with the
elements from which we came.
No life can be rounded and complete without the education that the
skeleton alone can give. Until it came we never knew the capacities of
the human soul. We had learned by rote to be forgiving, kind and true.
But the anguish of the human soul cannot be told—it must be felt or
never known. That charity born of true comradeship, which is the highest
and holiest sentiment of life, can be taught by the skeleton alone. The
self-righteous, who prate of forgiveness to their fellow men and who
look down upon their sinning brothers from above, are hypocrites or
fools. They either have not lived or else desire to pass for something
they are not. No one can understand the devious, miry paths trodden by
another soul unless he himself has wandered through the night.
Those placid, human lives that have moved along a narrow, even path;
that learned by rote the lessons that the churches and the schools have
ever taught; whose perfection consists in refraining from doing certain
things in certain ways; who never had a noble thought or felt a great
desire to help their fellow men—those blameless, aimless, worthless
souls, are neither good nor bad. They neither feel nor think; no
skeleton would deem it worth its while to come inside their door.
The world judges the conduct of youth by the standards of age. Even when
due allowance is made for the inexperience and haste of the young, it is
assumed that youth and age are measured by the calendar alone. Few have
ever been wise enough to know that every passion and circumstance must
be fully weighed, before an honest verdict can be written down; and that
therefore only the infinite can judge a human soul.
Though accursed, doubted, and despised, Nature ever persists in her
relentless plan. She would make us learn the lessons that youth so
easily forgets. She finds us headstrong, unreasoning, and moved by the
same feelings that sway the brute. She decrees that every act, however
blind or wilful, must leave its consequences on our lives, and these
immortal consequences we treat as skeletons and lock them up. But these
uncanny specters wrap us closely in their bony arms; they ever peer with
sightless eyes into our soul; they are with us if we sleep or wake, and
their persistent presence will not let us sleep. It is the hated,
imprisoned skeleton that we vainly sought to hide away, that takes an
untamed, fiery soul within its cruel, loving clasp, and holds it closely
in its unforgiving grasp until the vain longings and wild desires of
youth are subdued, and cooled, and the deeper harmonies of life are
learned. It is the hated skeleton that finds within our breast a heart
of flint and takes this hard and pulseless thing and scars and twists
and melts it in a thousand tortuous ways until the stony mass is purged
and softened and is sensitive to every touch.
It is this same despised skeleton that finds us vain and boastful and
critical of others’ sins, that watches every word we speak and even each
unuttered thought; it is with us when we tightly draw our robes and pass
our fellow on the other side; it hears us when we seek to show how good
we are by boasting of our neighbor’s sins; for every spot of black or
red that we see upon another’s robes, it points its bony fingers to a
scar upon our heart, to remind us that we are like the rest; and the
same finger ever points us to our wounds until we feel and understand
that the clay the Master used for us was as weak and poor as that from
which he made the rest.
However blind and stubborn we may be, however long we deny the lesson
that the skeleton would teach, still it will not let us go until with
perfect peace and harmony we look at all the present and the past, at
all that was, and all that is, and feel no regrets for what is gone, and
no fears for what must come. It may be that our stubborn, stiffnecked
soul will still persist until the hair is white and the heavy shadows
hang about our heads, but the skeleton with his soothing, softening
ally, time, sits with the last watchers at our suffering bed, and goes
if need be, to the silent grave, where alike the darkest crimson spot
and the softest, purest clay are reunited once again with the loving,
universal mother who has forgiven all and conquered all. It matters not
how high we seem to climb, or what the careless world may think for good
or ill. It matters not how many small ambitions we may seem to have
achieved. Even the unworthy cannot be forever soothed by the hollow
voice of fame. All triumphs are futile without the victory over self;
and when the triumph over self is won, there are no more battles to be
fought, for all the world is then at peace. It is the skeleton in the
closet pointing ever to the mistakes and maladjustments of our past, the
skeleton standing there before our gaze that makes us still remember
where our lives fell short; that teaches us so slowly but so surely to
turn from the unworthy victories and the dire defeats of life to the
mastery of ourselves. It is the skeleton from whom we learn that we can
live without the world, but not without ourselves.
Without the skeleton we could never feel another’s sorrow, or know
another’s pain. Philosophy and theology cannot tell us how another’s
life became a hopeless wreck. It is ourselves alone that reveals the
precipice along which every footpath leads. It is from life we learn
that it is but an accident when we fall, and equally an accident when we
keep the path. The pupil of the schools may look down with pitying
glance upon the unfortunate victim of what seems to be his sin. He may
point to a love that will forgive and kindly plead with him to take
another path, but the wayfarer that the skeleton has taught will clasp
this fellow mortal to his heart, for in his face he sees but the
reflection of himself. The wise and good may forgive the evil and the
wrong, but only the sinner knows that there is no sin.
The charity that is born of life and sin is not fine because of its
effect on some one else, but for what it does for us. True charity is
only the sense of the kinship of all living things. This is the charity
that neither humiliates nor offends. It is the sense that brings a new
meaning to life and a new purpose to the soul.
Let us do simple justice to this neglected, outcast guest, the useful,
faithful teacher of our lives. Let us open the closet door, and let the
skeleton come out, and lock the schoolmaster in its place. Let us leave
this faithful friend to roam freely at its will. Let us look it squarely
in the face with neither fear or shame, but with gratitude for the
lessons it has taught. It may be that the jeering crowd will point in
scorn as they see us with the grewsome figure at our side, but when we
fully learn the lesson that it came to teach, we shall need to look no
more without for the approval or disapproval of our acts, but seek to
satisfy ourselves alone. Let us place a new chair beside the hearth, in
the cosiest nook, and bid the skeleton take its place as the worthiest
guest. Let us neither parade nor hide our new-found friend, but treat it
as a fact of life—a fact that is, a fact that had the right to be, and a
fact that taught us how to find ourselves. Let us not forget the
parents, who watch us in our youth, and the friends that were ever good
and true. But above all, let us remember this grim and silent teacher,
who never neglected or forgot, who showed us life as only it could show,
who opened up new vistas to our soul, who touched our human hearts, who
made us know and love our fellowman, who softened and mellowed and
purified our souls until we felt the kinship that we bore to all living
things. Until it came we knew only the surface of the world. Before it
came, we had tasted of the shallow cup of joy and the bitter cup of
pain, but we needed this to teach us from the anguish of the soul that
there is a depth profound and great, where pain and pleasure both are
one. That there is a life so deep and true that earth’s rewards and
penalties alike are but a hollow show; that there is a conquest of
ourselves, which brings perfect peace and perfect rest.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PRINTED FOR C. L. RICKETTS
BY R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS
COMPANY, AT THE LAKESIDE
PRESS, CHICAGO, ILL. MCMII
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.