Atlantic Classics Volume Ii Part 5

But if the desire of every man to be somebody else accounts for many whimsicalities of human conduct and for many aberrations in the arts, it cannot be lightly dismissed as belonging only to the realm of comedy. It has its origin in the nature of things. The reason why every man wants to be somebody else is that he can remember the time when he was somebody else. What we call personal ident.i.ty is a very changeable thing, as all of us realize when we look over old photographs and read old letters.

The oldest man now living is but a few years removed from the undifferentiated germ-plasm, which might have developed into almost anything. In the beginning he was a bundle of possibilities. Every actuality that is developed means a decrease in the rich variety of possibilities. In becoming one thing it becomes impossible to be something else.

The delight in being a boy lies in the fact that the possibilities are still manifold. The boy feels that he can be anything that he desires.

He is conscious that he has capacities that would make him a successful banker. On the other hand, there are attractions in a life of adventure in the South Seas. It would be pleasant to lie under a bread-fruit tree and let the fruit drop into his mouth, to the admiration of the gentle savages who would gather about him. Or he might be a saint--not a commonplace modern saint who does ch.o.r.es and attends tiresome committee meetings, but a saint such as one reads about, who gives away his rich robes and his purse of gold to the first beggar he meets, and then goes on his carefree way through the forest to convert interesting robbers.

He feels that he might practice that kind of unscientific charity, if his father would furnish him with the money to give away.

But by and by he learns that making a success in the banking business is not consistent with excursions to the South Seas or with the more picturesque and unusual forms of saintliness. If he is to be in a bank he must do as the bankers do.

Parents and teachers conspire together to make a man of him, which means making a particular kind of man of him. All mental processes which are not useful must be suppressed. The sum of their admonitions is that he must pay attention. That is precisely what he is doing. He is paying attention to a variety of things that escape the adult mind. As he wriggles on the bench in the school-room, he pays attention to all that is going on. He attends to what is going on out-of-doors; he sees the weak points of his fellow pupils, against whom he is planning punitive expeditions; and he is delightfully conscious of the idiosyncrasies of the teacher. Moreover, he is a youthful artist and his sketches from life give acute joy to his contemporaries when they are furtively pa.s.sed around.

But the schoolmaster says sternly, 'My boy, you must learn to pay attention; that is to say, you must not pay attention to so many things, but you must pay attention to one thing, namely, the second declension.'

Now, the second declension is the least interesting thing in the room, but unless he confines his attention to it he will never learn it.

Education demands narrowing of attention in the interest of efficiency.

A man may, by dint of application to a particular subject, become a successful merchant or real-estate man or chemist or overseer of the poor. But he cannot be all these things at the same time. He must make his choice. Having in the presence of witnesses taken himself for better or worse, he must, forsaking all others, cleave to that alone. The consequence is that, by the time he is forty, he has become one kind of a man, and is able to do one kind of work. He has acquired a stock of ideas true enough for his purposes, but not so transcendentally true as to interfere with his business. His neighbors know where to find him, and they do not need to take a spiritual elevator. He does business on the ground floor. He has gained in practicality, but has lost in the quality of interestingness.

The old prophet declared that the young men dream dreams and the old men see visions, but he did not say anything about the middle-aged men.

_They_ have to look after the business end.

But has the man whose working hours are so full of responsibilities changed so much as he seems to have done? When he is talking shop is he 'all there'? I think not. There are elusive personalities that are in hiding. As the rambling mansions of the old Catholic families had secret panels opening into the 'priest's hole,' to which the family resorted for spiritual comfort, so in the mind of the most successful man there are secret chambers where are hidden his unsuccessful ventures, his romantic ambitions, his unfulfilled promises. All that he dreamed of as possible is somewhere concealed in the man's heart. He would not for the world have the public know how much he cares for the selves that have not had a fair chance to come into the light of day. You do not know a man until you know his lost Atlantis, and his Utopia for which he still hopes to set sail.

When Dogberry a.s.serted that he was 'as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina,' and 'one that hath two gowns and everything handsome about him,' he was pointing out what he deemed to be quite obvious. It was in a more intimate tone that he boasted, 'and a fellow that hath had losses.'

When Julius Caesar rode through the streets of Rome in his chariot, his laurel crown seemed to the populace a symbol of his present greatness.

But gossip has it that Caesar at that time desired to be younger than he was, and that before appearing in public he carefully arranged his laurel wreath so as to conceal the fact that he had had losses.

Much that pa.s.ses for pride in the behavior of the great comes from the fear of the betrayal of emotions that belong to a simpler manner of life. When the sons of Jacob saw the great Egyptian officer to whom they appealed turn away from them, they little knew what was going on. 'And Joseph made haste, for his bowels did yearn upon his brother: and he sought where to weep, and he entered into his chamber, and wept there.

And he washed his face, and went out, and refrained himself.' Joseph didn't want to be a great man. He wanted to be human. It was hard to refrain himself.

IV

What of the lost arts of childhood, the lost audacities and ambitions and romantic admirations of adolescence? What becomes of the sympathies which make us feel our kins.h.i.+p to all sorts of people? What becomes of the early curiosity in regard to things which were none of our business?

We ask as Saint Paul asked of the Galatians, 'Ye began well; who did hinder you?'

The answer is not wholly to our discredit. We do not develop all parts of our nature because we are not allowed to do so. Walt Whitman might exult over the Spontaneous Me. But n.o.body is paid for being spontaneous.

A spontaneous switchman on the railway would be a menace to the traveling public. We prefer some one less temperamental.

As civilization advances and work becomes more specialized, it becomes impossible for any one to find free and full development for all his natural powers in any recognized occupation. What then becomes of the other selves? The answer must be that playgrounds must be provided for them outside the confines of daily business. As work becomes more engrossing and narrowing, the need is more urgent for recognized and carefully guarded periods of leisure.

The old Hebrew sage declared, 'Wisdom cometh from the opportunity of leisure.' It does not mean that a wise man must belong to what we call the leisure cla.s.ses. It means that, if one has only a little free time at his disposal, he must use that time for the refreshment of his hidden selves. If he cannot have a sabbath rest of twenty-four hours, he must learn to sanctify little sabbaths, it may be of ten minutes' length. In them he shall do no manner of work. It is not enough that the self that works and receives wages shall be recognized and protected; the world must be made safe for our other selves. Does not the Declaration of Independence say that every man has an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness?

The old-time minister, after he had exhorted the believers at considerable length, used to turn to a personage who for homiletical purposes was known as the Objector. To him he addressed his most labored arguments. At this point I am conscious of the presence of the Objector.

'All you say,' he remarks, 'in praise of your favorite plat.i.tude is true to a fault. But what has all this to do with the War? There is only one thing in these days worth thinking about--at least, it is the only thing we _can_ think about.'

'I agree with you, courteous Objector. No matter where we start, we all come back to this point: Who was to blame for the War, and how is it coming out? Our explanatory idea has a direct bearing on the question before us. The Prussian militarists had a painstaking knowledge of facts, but they had a contempt for human nature. Their tactlessness was almost beyond belief. They treated persons as if they were things. They treated facts with deadly seriousness, but had no regard for feelings.

They had spies all over the world to report all that could be seen, but they took no account of what could not be seen. So, while they were dealing scientifically with the obvious facts and forces, all the hidden powers of the human soul were being turned against them. Prussianism insists on highly specialized men who have no sympathies to interfere with their efficiency. Having adopted a standard, all variation must be suppressed. It is against this effort to suppress the human variations that we are fighting. We don't want all men to be reduced to one pattern.'

'But what about the Kaiser? Does your formula explain him? Does he want to be somebody else?'

'I confess, dear Objector, that it is probably a new idea to him; but he may come to it.'

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The Temple's Difficult Door

By Robert M. Gay

Do you remember the little old white church which, when we were boys, we attended more or less unwillingly, according to the season, with its stiff-backed pews in which we sat aching, counting the pipes in the organ and the bal.u.s.ters in the altar-rail and the dentils in the moulding of the pulpit? Of course you remember it, and the little old lady who sat in a corner e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. her hallelujahs and amens with the regularity of a cuckoo-clock, and the solemn precentor who sawed out the time with his hand, and the preacher who took his texts from the Old Testament and rolled the names of the Ten Tribes and their enemies as a sweet morsel under his tongue. The little old lady, you recollect, was valiant in prayer-meeting. She was not afraid to criticize the minister, or to repeat week by week the story of her conversion in her ninth year.

Nor did she fail continually to impress upon us boys--facing us sometimes, with uplifted finger--the immanence of him who goeth to and fro in the earth and rageth like a lion, seeking whom he may devour. Ah, those prayer-meetings! Shall we, shall we ever forget them? Or the references to the sinners who sat on the back row (where we always sat)?

Or the wailing hymns, or the dismal testimonies, or the waves of dejection that swept over us during the cataloguing of our omissions and commissions?

And there was always a boy! Do you remember him? A boy of our own age, mind you, a boy who ostentatiously arose and, with the decorum of a deacon, dwelt upon his former iniquities and present beat.i.tude. We expected this of an occasional girl, yet the girls never did it; a mumbled text, a flurried word or two, were the extent of their temerity.

As for us, it was not our custom to discuss our souls, even among ourselves. It is said that to forget the existence of a stomach is the best symptom of health in that useful organ, and, if the a.n.a.logy holds, our souls must have been singularly robust. We were bashful about our virtues and vices; we could not fathom the sentiments of _Take Time to be Holy;_ we were in mortal fear that some day somebody might convict us of sin and hale us forthwith into the fold of the elect. Yet here was a boy who flaunted his goodness in our faces. It was evident that he was not normal, that it lay with us as a duty to puncture the bubble of his presumptuousness.

The time came, you remember, very opportunely. On a memorable evening it was announced that this Infant Samuel, as the little old lady called him, was to recite to the congregation the entire Book of Esther from memory. For us, who found it beyond our power to remember a Golden Text of ten words for ten minutes, such a performance was unbelievable. We put our heads together and evolved a plot, dark, yet charming in its simple effectiveness. We decided to make faces at him.

We were expert in the art of face-making, because we had practiced it for weeks upon our sisters who sang in the choir. They had suffered, but were now immune. The grimaces of a Grimaldi could not have ruffled the calm of their scornful features.

We planted ourselves in the front row, and the boy began his recital. In time his preoccupied and lack-l.u.s.tre eye wandered in our direction and rested upon us. He started, looked away, stammered, recovered, and went bravely on. But we knew that he would look back. We dared not glance at our neighbors, but had faith that each was doing his duty.

Of course he did look back, but why prolong the mournful tale? It is sufficient to say that Esther and Ahasuerus remained unwedded and Haman unhung; and that our victim retired amid the t.i.tterings of the judicious and the commiserations of the pious, while we plumed ourselves upon a difficult task laudably accomplished.

I have indulged in this long reminiscence, which probably can be matched in the experience of most of my masculine readers, because it is provocative of thoughts that deserve to be aired. An essay might be written upon the pathos that lies in the spectacle of a boy who is incited to a public display of his goodness; in the docility which is as clay in the hands of deluded adults. That he suffered there can be no doubt--not one half so much under the ordeal of our contriving, which, I hope, cured him, as under the isolation which his dedication to goodness made inevitable. He was a lonely boy, though he may not have realized that he was. That he could ever understand his fellows, or be understood by them, was impossible. He was the victim of the most perverse fate that can afflict a boy: he had been born in the bosom of a family whose piety contained not a grain of the salt of humor, not a particle of the leaven of imagination, not--But I am forgetting. I wish to ask the reader's consideration, not of the victim, but of the tormentors.

Why is it that boys are suspicious of that approximate moral perfection called goodness? Girls find a deep satisfaction in being good--in being neat, in being clean, in being decorous. If they are not these, we call them tomboys, still casting the onus of sinfulness upon the other s.e.x.

When we boys confided our exploit to the little girls, we found that they openly defended the boy, though, it must be admitted, they privately admired us, as is the way of their s.e.x. Our fathers, informed by our sisters, and instigated by our mothers, solemnly reproached us, but with a twinkle that would not be hidden. Manifestly, the trail of the serpent was over them, too. They were sorry that they had not sat in the choir.

The meekest of men love to tell how bad they were as boys, hugging their fiction of early depravity with an unregenerate glee. The more innocuous they may be now, the more they love to boast--especially to their wives--of these phantasmal wild oats. The ladies pretend to be shocked at the stories, but are glad to believe them; and so it is not surprising if some men, in their fear of being mistaken for saints, remain boys all their lives.

The pursuit of the ideal is complicated by man's suspicion of goodness, and by woman's curious, but characteristic, indecision whether to espouse perfection or imperfection. Gifted with a natural propensity toward virtue and propriety and neatness and respectability and all the other approximate perfections of life, attaining them with ease and wearing them with grace, she of course values them little enough in man.

His foibles interest her more than his virtues. She admires even while she condemns. He, because he is a man, prefers admiration to commendation.

In education, man as a rule inculcates ideals of perfection without pretending to practice them; but woman, with an iron logic which, man's aspersions to the contrary notwithstanding, is characteristic of her, not only points but leads the way. Hence it is that some teachers of her s.e.x have two manners, the human for social occasions, and the divine for the cla.s.s-room. In the privacy of their homes they have their imperfections; in the cla.s.s-room they are icily perfect. Their perfectness extends to such details as facial expression and tone of voice. Occasionally a man adopts the duplex character, but with deplorable result. I remember such a one in high school. Those of us who had the good fortune to meet him socially, found that he had his peccadillos of character, manner, and language, but in the school he was a pattern which we despaired of imitating. From his necktie to his reading of Burke's 'Conciliation,' he was without spot or blemish. We did not dare to love him; we gave up all hope of emulation. We nicknamed him Mrs. Dawson, and let it go at that.

But women carry this dual character more successfully than men. Whether because they are better actors or because we confuse saintliness with femininity, even as boys we are more ready to forgive it in them. To the little girls, it seems perfectly natural. They catch the idea readily and practice their teachers' precisions and pruderies upon the family.

We must admit, too, that in the art of being a pattern, women show a sterner conscientiousness than men. They are not const.i.tutionally so lazy. It requires hard and sustained effort to be a pattern, an inveterate and dogged attention to detail. It is chiefly here that we men fail. The male saints--witness Jerome--had a time of it with their petty temptations, simply because sainthood is largely a matter of detail. Most men are good enough in essentials, but fail in the little things; the little things, of which woman is enamored,--too often, the slave. To be perfect gives her a satisfaction that man will never understand; and, prompted by the const.i.tutional laziness aforesaid, he takes refuge in calling goodness womanish.

His inst.i.tutions, therefore, are good enough in essentials; his political organizations and governments, his bureaus and offices and federations and unions, all are n.o.bly planned, but lack the feminine touch that makes for perfection. His streets are dirty and so are his politics; his laws need dusting; a little sweeping would not hurt his governments; his various organizations would be none the worse for some polis.h.i.+ng and weeding and clipping of loose threads and sewing up of rents and various other species of revamping. All these last subtleties are beyond him, just as, be he never so neat, are all the tiny sweetnesses and refinements and knots and bows and satisfying knick-knacks of his wife's person. She is a creature of _soupcons_ and _nuances_ and intuitive niceties. She can endure no compromise with disorder or dirt or decay. Her motes are all beams until they are demolished; she uses a mountain of faith to move a mustard-seed; she cannot see the polished surface for the speck of dust that is on it. In her extreme development she spends her life doing the million and one trifles that man would leave undone.

The trouble is that, not satisfied with all this, she longs to make him perfect, too. Never deterred by the stupendousness of the task, she goes on, century by century, generation by generation, teaching him, preaching to him, marrying him; gently leading him or tyrannously compelling him toward the heaven of her ideal. And here again her gaze is microscopic. In her attention to his foibles she is liable to overlook his sins. She can seldom understand badness in boys, nor can ever see that the boy who is most bad in small matters may be the most good in large. She loves to keep her male offspring lamblike, and tries his docility by making him wear long hair and wide collars and linen and ruffles and lace, never learning but through hard experience that, like the puppy, he takes naturally to mud and feels at ease only close to the soil. When he at last rebels and privily snips off his hair and rends his sashes and furbelows, she weeps, not because of the loss of material, but because of the loss of an ideal.